Sometimes doves move out of an area for no obvious reason, so the idea is to stay in touch with the area you intend to hunt by visiting the area a few days before the season opens. The A-1 dove attractant known to man is a field full of mature sunflowers. Doves love to gorge on sunflower seeds, get their water at stock tanks and spend the night roosting in fairly large mesquite trees. Find a place that has those three ingredients in fairly close proximity and you'll almost surely find doves nearby. This is probably a good place to mention that it is illegal to scatter feed for, or bait, doves.
Doves are migratory game birds, and as such they fall under federal game laws.
In Texas we can put out feed for deer and quail, but the baiting of doves is strictly forbidden and the penalties for this violation are severe. We found good numbers of birds scattered across the 7,000-acre property, but where we really found good concentrations of birds was around stock ponds during the hour before sunset. Glasscock County, which received more rainfall this year than the Abilene area, is just as hot and dry right now as your hunting lease and the doves there were streaming into those watering holes at sunset. We'd all like to think, and hope, that rain will fall during the next few days before the dove season, but in reality it probably won't happen and that's going to make water-hole shooting for doves during the first days of the season super productive. Yeah, I'll agree that it will rain sometime in September, and I don't care if it rains enough to ruin our dove season completely, but the rain outlook for the next couple of weeks is pretty grim and that's good news for opening-week dove hunters.