Virginia dove season 2026

Virginia DWR operates a Managed Dove Fields program on Wildlife Management Areas (WMAs), planting food crops including sunflower, millet, sorghum, milo, corn, and peanuts to provide habitat for dove hunting. Fields are planted annually and updated every summer. As of 2025, DWR is shifting from intensive sunflower fields toward less-costly alternatives due to budget constraints, with changes progressing over multiple years. No permit or draw is required; hunters access fields per standard WMA regulations.

DWR publishes the current list here

DWR publishes no consolidated named dove-field list; the historical Dove-Field-Map PDFs return 404 as of 2026-08-21. These five records are therefore at WMA granularity rather than individual-field granularity, and each was confirmed directly on that WMA's own DWR page, which carries a "Dove Fields Information and Map for this WMA" link. Four further WMAs (C.F. Phelps, Horsepen, Ware Creek, Chickahominy) name dove among their huntable species but do not carry that managed-field link, so they are noted here rather than listed as fields. Seven that appeared only in web-search results (Cavalier, Featherfin, Highland, Little North Mountain, Hidden Valley, Gathright, Goshen) had no dove reference on their own DWR pages and were dropped. Dove hunting is excluded entirely at Hog Island and Princess Anne.

DWR's own Dove page and its most recent Dove Hunting Forecast (both fetched directly, PRIMARY) contain no regional distribution or density statement -- the forecast's only geographic language is that “conditions varied around the state” for habitat/crop timing and that “good numbers of young doves” were banded “throughout the state,” with no per-region breakdown. DWR's Managed Dove Fields program itself, rather than pointing toward a natural concentration, spans essentially every landscape type in the state -- the current WMA list (fetched directly) includes Coastal Plain/Tidewater sites (Chickahominy, Cavalier, Ware Creek), Piedmont sites (Amelia, Featherfin, Powhatan, C.F. Phelps), and western-mountain sites (Clinch Mountain, Highland, Little North Mountain, Hidden Valley, Gathright, Goshen) alike, suggesting the program is built for statewide public-hunting access rather than concentrated on the species' best habitat. This mirrors this dataset's South Carolina mourning dove precedent (same batch, prior state): an active in-house field/hunting program exists, but neither it nor the species' own agency page states a sub-state concentration, despite dove favoring agricultural open land that is not evenly distributed across Virginia's coastal-to-mountain gradient.