Immediately urge your Representative and Senator to vote NO on HB5029.

l Lead is Toxic and Hazardous to the Environment. Representative Tabor, author of HB5029, said: "It takes about eight boxes of shells to harvest just one bird." Hunters would deposit over 450,000,000 lead pellets on the ground to dissolve, be relocated by storm water runoff, and leach into ground water.

l Lead Shot Ingestion is Poisonous. Agricultural fields are deliberately planted and managed to attract Mourning Doves for hunting by conditioning them to congregate for food. Doves, being tremendous seed connoisseurs, ingest look-a-like toxic pellets. Doves poisoned after ingesting one lead pellet lose vigor and become an easy catch for predators. Lead pellets ingested directly by birds from soil or vegetation or indirectly by predators and scavengers impacts all life through acute or chronic lead poisoning.

l Pain and Suffering. Doves are the only known species to be hunted during their nesting season, fledging young in mid-September. If a parent is injured or killed, the young will die of starvation. Doves blend in with the ground, so retrieval of downed birds is difficult. An average of 30% are not retrieved, left to suffer pain and a slow death.

l Other Bird Species will be Adversely Impacted. Enormous numbers of migratory songbirds stop at critical areas for food, water, shelter, and rest. Dove hunters would unintentionally disrupt the exhausted neo-tropical migrants foraging for insects before they replenished their energy. The disruption and additional stress caused by dove shooting could cause losses and death of the fragile migrants.

l Mourning Doves are on the Decline in Michigan and Significantly Declining in Hunting States. In the past 30 years, dove populations have declined by 75 million or 15% in hunting states. The Michigan DNR estimates 40,000 small game hunters would be allowed to kill 15 doves per day for 60 days, or 900 birds per hunter per season. This decline reduces the important food supply for the larger resident and migratory bird-eating raptors.

l Over 2.6 million people spend $693 million on non-consumptive wildlife activities in Michigan. The Mourning Dove is the second most popular feeder bird. The ‘ripple effect’ from bird-watching expenditures creates jobs, employment, income, state and federal income tax. The MUCC confirms the "inexpensive nature of the sport" of dove hunting since "hunters needn’t travel far".

l Additional costs for law enforcement to enforce this extra hunting season would be incurred. To hunt doves, no additional license will be required.

l The decisions to designate non-game species as game belong with the Legislature, not the appointed Natural Resource Commission who is unaccountable to the voting public. The passage of this bill, as introduced, would transfer the authority to designate protected non-game species as game from our elected Legislature to the NRC.

There is no reason to kill Mourning Doves in Michigan. A disruption in the food chain negatively affects us all.

Judi Manning
Park Township