GREAT OUTDOORS: Hard to believe, but hunting season is here

Is it hunting season already? It seemed like just yesterday that the early afternoon temperature was over 90 degrees and I was anxious to get off the lake after the perch stopped biting. Thankfully, it's becoming a little cooler now, but it is still hard to believe that the annual hunting seasons are about to begin. The calendar doesn't lie On Monday, Sept. 1, squirrel, dove and certain shorebird seasons begin for various lengths of time. Squirrels are an easy-to-identify, plentiful, tasty wild game animal hunted for hundreds of years in North America. Early Canada goose and teal seasons run from September 6-14. Canada geese are impossible to misidentify, but wood ducks are often illegally shot during the early teal season (when "big duck" season is still closed) by those unskilled with waterfowl identification. Gallinule, Virginia and Sora rails and Wilson's snipe are best left for veteran marsh fowlers since they are even harder to identify than distinguishing teal from wood ducks. While many of the aforementioned species are familiar to those who have been hunting for a while, one unfamiliar bird species that may be encountered while Mourning dove hunting is the Eurasian collared dove. More towns have seen them move in and begin nesting. Their history in North America began when a Nassau, Bahamas, pet store was burglarized in 1974 and the distraught shopkeeper released the rest of his birds. These invasive doves, which lay multiple clutches of eggs per season like Mourning doves, soon grew into a population numbering in the tens of thousands in the Bahamas. Their first appearance in the U.S. was formally documented in Florida in 1980. By 1987, their numbers there surpassed 10,000 before spreading westward into other Gulf of Mexico states. As is their tendency, young birds expanded in a northwesterly fashion and soon populated the western U.S. all of the way to the Pacific coast and into Alaska before backfilling their way east toward the Rocky Mountain, Upper Plains and Midwest. Current range maps still exclude Michigan and the northeast U.S. from Pennsylvania to Maine. Nonetheless, the Cornell Lab of Ornithology observed that, "No species of bird has colonized North America at the speed at which the Eurasian collared dove has marched across the continent." According to the American Ornithologists Union, the first confirmed specimens in Ohio was one shot in 2001 in Crawford County, then another was photographed at a bird feeder in Licking County in 2006. Small flocks in some Ohio towns caught the attention of knowledgeable observers in 2007 and their numbers continued to grow. In other states, as an invasive species, they are allowed to be shot year-round, with no bag limits. They were added to Ohio's official list of game bird species about eight years ago, but their open season matches that of Mourning doves and counts toward a combined daily dove limit. After a few years of their presence in my area, I wondered if one would be worthy of mounting. Obviously, that decision is always up to the person who shoots, traps or lands any game bird, mammal, fish or reptile. However, because Eurasian collared doves are invasive and considered potentially detrimental to native doves, should they be honored beyond a mealtime blessing? If so, why not a feral pigeon? The National Audubon Society predicted long ago that Eurasian collared doves will eventually become "the new beige starling of North America," and who wants a mounted starling on the wall?