Michigan Proposal 3 and mourning dove management

[djkimmel]

If you hunt and want to continue, and/or give your children and their children to choice to have the opportunity, and even if you don't hunt, but can recognize that many of the same people who want to take away our hunting privileges also would like to stop us from enjoying the great sport of fishing, please read on about this year's Michigan Proposal 3.

I'm hoping you'll vote yes on Proposal 3, not just so you can hunt mourning doves, but to keep game management decisions in the scientific realm (as the entire state voted several years ago overwhelmingly to support with the scientific management of game proposal), not the political.

Some people don't like the idea of shooting mourning doves and I can understand that, but I can also disagree and decide for myself if I want to hunt a bird that is recognized and managed in most states as a game bird.

I definitely can not stand by though and let the anti's take away my ability to hunt and fish one piece at a time as they have planned and are doing. They won't stop one day thinking they've raised enough money, or that they've stopped enough hunting and fishing. They won't stop until they've taken away all of our hunting and fishing, and animal research, and turned us all into tofu vegans. I don't believe I'll sit back and just let them have their way.

[djkimmel]

From:   jcs@jcsinc.com
To:   djkimmel@aol.com
Subject:   Proposal 3
Date:   Wed, 4 Oct 2006 9:56 PM


I am writing you today to urge you to vote Yes on Proposal 3 on November 7th. Michigan has been targeted by a fanatical animal rights organization to push their agenda. This out-of-state group doesn?t have a special affinity for mourning doves; it is just one step in their multi-step effort to end all hunting, fishing, and even pet ownership. This extreme group wants to ban all life-saving animal medical research. The president of this organization pushing the no vote on 3 has been quoted saying "We're out to stop all hunting, starting with the easiest sell..."

Mourning Doves are federally regulated, migratory game birds, hunted in 40 other states. Professional wildlife management has produced steady population growth of more than 400 million birds across the country. By voting Yes on Proposal 3, you keep the decisions on hunting and wildlife management in the hands of wildlife professionals and out of politics. Voting Yes on Proposal 3 stops the animal rights extremists groups in their tracks.

I've attached two PDFs that will allow you to print out "Friend to Friend" cards and hand these out or mail these cards to your friends, family, co-workers and neighbors, encouraging them to support hunting here in Michigan by voting YES on Proposal 3. If you print these out to send to people, make sure that you set the "Print Scaling" in Adobe Acrobat Reader to "Fit to Printer Margins".

If you would like to donate to the fight to protect hunter's rights, go to
http://www.cwcmi.org/donations.htm

Please let me know if you have any questions, and thanks for your continued support on Proposal 3.

Jim Shaeffer

Need Adobe Reader installed to open these:
Card front pdf

Card back pdf

[djkimmel]

I'M OPTING FOR OHIO

By Linda Gallagher

By the time you read this, our last big summer weekend, Labor Day weekend, will have come to a happy conclusion, with many of us having wonderful memories to store of a weekend spent chasing the last of the offshore salmon or waiting for the arrival of the first flock of geese in the first of Michigan's 2006 fall hunting seasons.

I'll also have wonderful memories of my first hunt of the 2006 hunting season-but my memories won't be from the state of Michigan. Mine will be from the state of Ohio, where I have participated in a new family tradition for the past 10 years or so-dove hunting.

It just wouldn't be September unless I was standing with my son on the edge of a field, probably on public land, both of us squinting into the late afternoon sun with the sweat dripping off our noses, waiting for the waves of hundreds of birds preparing to stage their evening raids on the profuse corn and soybean crops of northern Ohio.

"Here comes one!", my son will whisper. "Take 'em!"

Peering through the glare of the hot sun, I'll pick out my quarry, moving at lightning speed towards me in my camoflaged hide in the weeds. Focusing on the bird with the bead on my 20 gauge as it roars past, I'll squeeze the trigger. If my eyes behave, my target will drop into the field in front of me.

During my first dove season, when that happened, I thought "That was easy," as I retrieved the small bundle of feathers.

One hour and two boxes of shells later, I wasn't so sure, looking ruefully at my total harvest of three birds. Now, I know better, and know that it will take several boxes of shells to gather 5 or 6 birds, enough for a dinner for two that will taste better than pheasant under glass.

Having had that experience, I've been a die-hard dove hunter ever since.

Unfortunately, most of the sportsmen and women in the state of Michigan haven't tried the sport of dove hunting, and simply don't know what they're missing.

But we're trying. Through the leadership of Citizens for Wildlife Management, a grass-roots conservation group formed to fight the anti-hunting movement in Michigan, beginning with the effort to re-instate the hunt the state allowed in 2004, the sportsmen and women of Michigan are campaigning to bring you a dove season, a sport that 40 other states enjoy as a popular family activity every year.

The issue, known as Proposal 3, will be on our statewide ballot in November.

Erroneously considered a songbird by many people in this state, in truth Michigan has a resident breeding population of more than 4 million mourning doves, making it our most prolific bird of any species, according to the Audubon Society, that annually migrate every fall to winter in a state where they are managed for what they are-upland gamebirds.

Management means far more than hunting-it also means habitat improvement and conservation measures that ensure the future of not only the mourning dove but hundreds of other species of flora and fauna, many of them endangered not as a result of hunting but as a result of the unrelenting development and pollution the human race is foisting upon our sensitive environment every day.

Being hunted by a handful of sportsmen for a few days in early September is the least of the dove's worries, but people against the sport of hunting in Michigan do not as yet appear to understand that, instead preferring to pull the wool over your eyes with babble about the dove's sweet song, which is no less sweet than that of the bobwhite quail, a hunted species in this state, or how they "grace" your bird feeders-well, so do ruffed grouse, wild turkeys, ducks, and ringneck pheasants, not to mention thousands of geese that annually spoil expensive lakefront lawns, making hunters a welcome sight to that same bird feeder owner.

Mourning doves are not shot off utility lines, off bird feeders, or massacred in huge slaughters-if you ever hear any of this, that person has never been dove hunting, and should not be regarded as any kind of authority on the subject.

In fact, the mourning dove isn't even the "bird of peace" mentioned in the Bible-that bird was a turtle dove, a species not even present in North America.

But Michigan does not as yet seem to understand that, so, for us, the tradition of hunting in Ohio will continue, at least until next year, when we hope to keep our hunting and the hundreds of dollars we spend every year on licenses, gear, food, gas, and lodging here at home.

It's all up to you. Remember that in November, and help other avid dove hunters, like my son and myself, start a new tradition of enjoying the annual dove hunt together in the great state of Michigan.