Contact: Bob Ratliff
Images from high-flying satellites are helping Mississippi State wildlife researchers learn more about a very popular high-flier that travels closer to earth.
Researchers at the university's Forest and Wildlife Research Center are nearing completion of a three-year study on the future of Mississippi's dove population.
Dove season, which opens Sept. 2, annually brings out some 80,000 hunters in search of the nation's No. 1 harvested bird. Dave Godwin of the Mississippi Department of Wildlife, Fisheries and Parks said that, while more than 1.5 million doves were harvested in Mississippi last year alone, "little research has been done on the one most frequently hunted, the mourning dove."
Sponsored by Godwin's department with Federal Aid in Wildlife Restoration funding, the dove population study is a research center first. MSU wildlife and fisheries professor Francisco Vilella is project leader.
"This is a unique project because we are looking at dove habitat relationships for a large landscape and over a long time period," he said. "This also is the first time the entire state has been studied."
Since 1966, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has inventoried dove populations along 23 secondary roads and other routes in Mississippi. Focusing on 10 of those routes, MSU researchers are comparing population counts generated from the annual study to changes they have identified in landscape and habitat.
Vilella said many changes have occurred in Mississippi's landscape over the years.
"Small-scale agricultural lands have been converted to large-scale agriculture and forest enterprises," he observed. "We are reviewing spatial images from satellites over the past three decades to determine the relationship between changes in habitat and changes in dove populations."
Because habitat preferred by the birds is along the edges of fields and other open areas adjoining woodlands, "this (change) may have had an effect on the population of the mourning dove."
While final data won't be available until later this year, general trends already are evident, Vilella said. Among the findings: overall numbers of doves are on the decline in Mississippi, but mourning doves are more abundant in the Delta, possibly because agriculture is the predominant land use in that area.
He said MSU scientists hope their completed findings will provide valuable information for wildlife experts both in Mississippi and in states with similar conditions. The project also is expected to help landowners take individual actions to improve dove populations.
"This research will answer some of the questions we have, but it also is raising other questions," Vilella said. "More research is needed to determine issues such as mortality, predation, production and survival of the mourning dove."