Hunting season is like a baseball game, and you are a rookie facing some ace like Tim Lincecum or Andy Petitte on your first trip to the plate. It's like that particularly for wingshooters. After a long layoff, the new season's first challenge is to hit a mourning dove -- the brown rocket of late-summer fields.

The first phase of Pennsylvania's dove season begins Sept. 1 and continues through Sept. 28. Hunting is permitted from noon until sunset. The daily bag limit is 15 birds. Doves become legal game again Oct. 23-Nov. 27 and Dec. 27-Jan. 1. Dove hunters must buy and possess a Pennsylvania migratory bird license and a general hunting license.

The mourning dove's degree of difficulty for shotgunners is legendary. Byron Dalrymple, who traveled the world in the 1970s and '80s wingshooting and writing about it, wrote: "Ammunition makers love [the mourning dove]. Estimates place the number of shells emptied annually at mourning doves at over 200 million."

The mourning dove is the most widespread game bird in Pennsylvania and in the United States. Estimates by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service place the North American population at roughly a half billion birds.

Doves are migratory but nest in every county in Pennsylvania and every state in the lower 48. Find them along woodland edges, pine plantings and in suburban and residential settings. Doves prefer warm temperatures --by September birds buzzing Pennsylvania fields may have hatched farther north. The USFWS Mourning Dove Population Status report for 2006 states that hunters annually take about 6 percent of the continental population.

Doves are seed eaters. They seek easily gleaned grains and other seeds from harvested fields or low-growing weeds. Their daily needs also include roosting sites, water and grit -- small stones and gravel which aids in grinding food.

Dalrymple believed dove hunters' shooting skill was less important than picking the right spot for a stand, ideally at a spot where doves slow their flight while sizing up food, water and cover.

"That's an ingrained dove habit," Dalrymple wrote. "They'll slow down as they decide where to alight. Somewhere here is the 'easy pickin's' stand."

Avid dove hunters scout their hunting areas before the season, looking for heavily used flyways between water, food and roosting sites. Fence rows, lone standing trees or round hay bales along those routes offer possible spots for ambushing passing doves.

There is no way to know exactly how many Pennsylvanians hunt doves, but the Harvest Information Program survey hunters fill out when buying migratory bird licenses provides an estimate. That data indicates that somewhere between 30,000 and 40,000 Pennsylvania hunters hit the fields for doves at least once each fall. They log about 160,000 hunting days (about four trips per hunter) and place approximately 450,000 birds in the bag.

"The popularity of dove hunting varies a lot across this region," said Game Commission Northwest Region law enforcement supervisor, Clint Deniker. "It's extremely popular in Erie County and on the potato fields of Clarion County. In Lawrence County, near Plain Grove, there's a gravel pit near Game Lands 151 that is heavily hunted early in the season. But as far as the whole northwest region, we do not experience a ton of dove pressure. It's very much keyed to land use and the kinds of places that draw birds."

Deniker said that because most dove hunting takes place on private land it is important for hunters to respect landowners' property.

"Always ask permission," he said. "And always pick up your spent shell casings. That's the No. 1 complaint about dove hunters. Some tend to leave piles of casings behind. It's unsightly and it can be a nuisance to farmers when shells snag in machinery."

Dove populations across the country are monitored by wildlife professionals who drive prescribed routes through known habitat, recording birds they hear and see.

"Our officers do the dove survey every year," Deniker said. "The population certainly remains strong."

Doves are hunted in 41 states. Only in New England and some parts of the Mid Atlantic and Midwest are doves considered non-game.

In 1992 an Ohio group called Save The Doves succeeded in temporarily halting dove hunting and putting its future before voters in a statewide referendum.

"Voters turned down the 'no dove-hunting' initiative 60-40," said Ohio Division of Wildlife executive administrator of Wildlife Management Research, Dave Scott. "Ohio reinstated dove hunting in 1995 and it's going fine. Therefore, Ohio hunters get to again hunt America's most popular game bird."

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