Wildlife biologist Mark Fisher has operated a mourning dove banding station at Devils Lake Wetland Management District for two years. In doing so, he has learned valuable lessons.
“It is wise to trap near a small–sized town, as many doves use the trees as their night roosts,” he says. “Weedy field edges are normally good locations for setting traps, as well as along railroad grades,” perhaps because of mineral resources, such as calcium carbonate and quartz grains, found there.
Baiting is important, too. The critical factor, Fisher says, “is that we bait each site every day to keep doves interested.” Also, keep the bait pile small and “inside the traps and away from the edges to prevent the doves from picking away ‘free’ grain.”
Devils Lake WMD manages more than 51,400 acres on 217 waterfowl production areas in northeastern North Dakota. In addition to providing nesting habitat for waterfowl, it is an important migratory bird stopover. And it is one of two dozen National Wildlife Refuge System units—from the Great Plains to Texas and Nevada, and from South Carolina to New Jersey to Maine—that are helping the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s Division of Migratory Bird Management collect mourning dove data by banding the popular game bird.
“Mourning doves are one of the first migratory birds to return to Devils Lake, arriving the first week of May,” says Fisher. Breeding begins early in June and the breeding population is typically banded for six weeks starting July 1. Most of the doves leave by late September and tend to migrate due south, as band recoveries from Oklahoma, Texas and Mexico indicate.
Commonly seen at backyard bird feeders and recognized by their familiar coo–oo, OO, OO, OO, mourning doves are one of the nation’s most abundant bird species, according to call–count and North American Breeding Bird Survey data. Their estimated U.S. population is 350 million.
Given those numbers, it may seem unusual that wildlife managers have spent more than a decade developing a National Strategic Harvest Management Plan. However, it is important to monitor consumptive use and evaluate the regulations that manage it to ensure the sustainability of mourning doves, whose hunting harvest in 2010 was more than 17 million. Along with traditional count and survey data, harvest strategies include band recovery data that can help provide information about dove vital rates—reproduction, survival, age composition and harvest—to assist in developing predictive models.
Meeting the banding goals that have been established for the 48 contiguous states has proved challenging because of insufficient funding and lack of trained personnel.
“Refuges are vital to the dove banding effort because, without them, there are many states and areas of the country where we have no way of meeting our banding quotas,” says Mark Seamans, who, as the Service’s western webless coordinator, specializes in doves, cranes and other game birds. “We need their participation to make this program successful.”
While some refuges are uniquely positioned to assist with long–term monitoring, they need proper tools to contribute quality data. To help in training, Mountain–Prairie Region migratory bird specialists and partners have developed an instructional DVD. The take–home message is: Dove banding is not labor–intensive, expensive or time–consuming; it is an important and enjoyable effort that contributes to the conservation of one of our shared trust species.
As an added bonus, says Fisher, dove banding provides hands–on outreach at Devils Lake WMD and “has helped get children excited about wildlife.”
Adrianna Araya is a Mountain–Prairie Region migratory bird specialist.
