South Carolina · MigratoryMourning dove

SCDNR publishes no sub-state regional breakdown for mourning dove, despite having an active, long-running in-house dove research program (SCDNR biologists helped develop the national Call Count Survey methodology in the 1950s and continue harvest/survival studies with Clemson University). Both SCDNR's own species page and its dedicated management guide describe dove habitat preference and biology only in general, statewide terms: the majority of doves harvested in South Carolina are resident birds, preferring river and creek bottoms near agricultural fields and open/semi-open grain-producing land, without naming a denser sub-region the way SCDNR's own quail sourcing does for the same row-crop habitat type. The state's public Wildlife Management Area (WMA) dove field program (roughly 45 fields annually) reinforces this: SCDNR's own youth dove hunt list spans the Upstate/Piedmont (Spartanburg, Pickens, York, Abbeville counties), the Midlands (Lexington, Fairfield, Newberry), and the coastal plain/Lowcountry (Aiken, Orangeburg) in the same season, deliberately distributed statewide rather than concentrated in one region. Treated as uniform statewide distribution, not an unresearched gap.