Michigan Is the Only Midwest State Where You Can't Hunt Doves

Ohio’s dove season opened Sept. 1. But Michigan still treats them like songbirds.

Drive south of Grand Rapids on a warm September afternoon, and you see wires full of them.

In Ohio, dove hunting season opened the same day in Indiana and Wisconsin. Fifteen birds a day per hunter. Nearly a million hunters across the country took about 15.5 million mourning doves last season. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service puts the national population around 330 million.

Michigan still says no.

Woodcock and grouse open here on Sept. 15. You can chase a timberdoodle and hunt a squirrel. You can sit a September goose field. But you can’t shoot the dove on the wire above the same field.

Michigan banned mourning dove hunting in 1905, even though it is a migratory game bird under federal law and managed as one almost everywhere else.

The Natural Resources Commission tried to open a season in 1985. The Humane Society sued. A court said only the state legislature could declare the first open season for a new game species. In 2004, the legislature finally put it on. Gov. Jennifer Granholm signed the bill. The NRC approved a three-year trial in six counties near the Indiana border. Hunters got one season, Sept. 10 through Oct. 30.

Then the petitions came in. The law was suspended. In 2006, a ballot proposal asked voters whether to keep the season. They said no by 69%. More than 2.5 million votes against. About 1.1 million for.

Voters settled it then. Fair enough. That was also 20 years and a few million more doves ago. Abundance did not stop when the ballots were counted.

The arguments haven’t changed much. Doves are at bird feeders. They’re a symbol of peace. They’re too small. But small game is small, that is the point. A dove is a bird you shoot over a cut field at dusk, clean, and eat. Same as anything else we hunt and every state around us does this already.

Hunters already pay for conservation in this state. License fees and federal excise taxes on guns and ammo funded the habitat work that brought turkeys back from zero. A dove stamp would do what a turkey tag does: put money behind a bird people want to chase. In 2004, the proposed stamp was $2.

Last September, Rep. Pat Outman introduced House Bill 5068 to add mourning doves to the game list and order the NRC to set a season by April 1, 2026. It went to committee and sat there. April 1 came and went. No season, no stamp, and no opener.

September 15 is coming, so get your small game license ready, but leave the doves alone for now because Lansing won’t let you do anything else.