Legislature should take aim at dove hunting bill

By Iowa City Press-Citizen

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For some reason - amid all the hot-button budget and social issues being bandied about the Iowa Legislature this year - a proposal to create a hunting season for mourning doves has managed to survive the first legislative funnel.

Senate File 464 (former SF83) would add the words “mourning dove” to the list of game animals for which the state Natural Resources Commission can set a hunting season. The measure passed out of the Senate Natural Resources and Environment Committee on a 10-3 vote.

Because the gray mourning doves technically are game birds rather than songbirds, it's likely that the commission, without any restrictions against it, would have set a hunting season for the plump-appearing birds long ago. It's only the protection that state law has afforded the birds since 1918 that has kept them out of hunters' sights. Iowa, in fact, is the only state west of the Mississippi River that does not have a season for dove hunting.

But other than some of our neighboring states having legalized dove hunting in the past decade, the arguments on both sides really haven't changed that much in the past 93 years.

-Iowans wishing to hunt the birds point out that mourning doves are in no danger of extinction - indeed, they outnumber humans at least 2 to 1. They say the hunting season could bring some tourism dollars into the state, and they point out that any birds killed by hunters probably would have their lives shortened by only a few weeks.

- Iowans who want the state to continue protecting the birds argue that too many non-game birds are killed accidentally by hunters who mistake them for doves. They say that songbirds too often become targets because they inhabit the same territory as the doves. They point to studies showing that many wounded doves are not retrieved but are often used as mere target practice rather than as a food source. And they say that a mourning dove season would bring hunters closer to the farmsteads that the birds inhabit.

We think Iowa already has plenty of game and plenty of seasons to hunt that game. State law allows the commission to set a season for gray and fox squirrel, bobwhite quail, cottontail or jackrabbit, duck, snipe, pheasant, goose, woodcock, partridge, coot, rail, ruffed grouse, wild turkey, pigeons and deer.

It doesn't make sense to us for the Legislature to expand that list to include a bird of such limited food value - especially a bird that has become a regular part of the neighborhood mix of songbirds.