North Carolina dove season 2026

NCWRC plants and manages dove fields on public Game Lands statewide, seeded in millet, milo, sunflowers, sorghum, corn, or crop mixtures and normally harvested, mowed, or burned before the season opens. Fields are documented at the individual-plot level (name, planted crop, acreage, and boundary) in NCWRC's public "Dove Fields" ArcGIS FeatureServer layer, the data source behind the interactive Game Land Access Map at ncpaws.org; that layer is queryable directly (no login/token required) and is the authoritative field-level list, not any static PDF or webpage. Most fields are ordinary walk-in access for licensed, HIP-certified hunters. A handful of game lands carry field-specific restrictions published in NCWRC's game land regulations digest: Croatan Game Land requires a permit to hunt posted dove-field areas on the first two open days of the season; Sandy Mush Game Land is permit-only from opening day through the second Saturday; Sandhills Game Land closes dove hunting on its field-trial grounds (a sub-area, not separately delineated in the GIS layer) from the third Sunday in September onward; and Needmore Game Land is permit-only on posted dove fields on opening day (Needmore has no field polygon in the current public GIS layer, so its field-level acreage/planting could not be captured).

NCWRC publishes the current list here

The named field list is not published as static text/PDF; it is published as a live, queryable ArcGIS FeatureServer layer ("Dove Fields", part of the public "NCWRC Game Land Access Map" web map, item id 12c9cab49c7e4bd699a2fb36f4a60b9d) that ncpaws.org's interactive map renders in-browser. Queried directly at https://services1.arcgis.com/YfqBAUM5nWR3yhGP/arcgis/rest/services/NCWRC_Game_Land_Dove_Fields_(public_view)/FeatureServer/0/query?where=1=1&outFields=*&f=json (no token needed) on 2026-08-21: returned 215 individually named dove-field polygons across 28 game lands, each with Field_Name, Game_Land, up to 4 crop attributes, acreage, and a LastUpdate year (values range 2018-2026, so plot-level crop data is not uniformly current to 2026). Needmore Game Land's dove-field restriction is documented in NCWRC's regulations digest but Needmore has no polygon in this layer, so it is recorded with null acreage/planting/coordinates.

No sub-state regional distinction is published for mourning dove in North Carolina, and a genuine check (not a default) found nothing underneath the "statewide" language. NCWRC's own species page describes the population as found statewide near agricultural fields and water; the state runs no dove hunting zone system (all three season splits apply identically statewide, unlike states that split dove seasons by zone); and NCWRC's public dove-field program is deliberately spread across 23 game-land tracts "all across the state" rather than concentrated in any one region — the same scattered-by-design pattern this project has treated elsewhere as evidence against a regional-concentration claim, not neutral evidence for one. One secondary source (Dive Bomb Industries) names Jordan Game Land and "northeastern North Carolina" as productive, but this is a single, uncorroborated mention that did not hold up against a dedicated search for a matching agency or independent source, so it was not treated as a real region.