Duking Doves

After several years of keeping their distance, mourning doves have begun flying to the feeder. This bird is usually a ground pecker—bobbing its head randomly about as it mincingly steps this way, then that. Over the last several years we might get a quick dove visit to the yard, but only briefly to peck around in the grass before it flew off—its wings whistling as if it was calling out in its effort to become airborne.

The mourning dove is a first cousin to the rock dove—the common city pigeon who loves to beg from soft-touch, park-bench sitting city people. They both are in the family Columbidae. (By the way, the city pigeon is an import from Europe.) While its city cousin is colored in shades of gray, the mourning dove is brown-gray, with a lovely reddish-brown belly.

Pete Dunne has written several books on birds. His descriptions of them often evoke a chuckle in me. He says that the mourning dove’s “head is small, almost ridiculously so.” The bird looks “like a teardrop with a tail or a pear on a stick. The turquoise-ringed eye is balefully black.” (He describes the city pigeon as a “tame to the point of being underfoot. Particularly in urban areas, attracted to anyone eating anything.”)

The mourning dove’s call has given it its soulful name, but I hear it as a sweet, comforting lullaby—reminding me of my mom’s soft songs when she put me to bed as a youngster. When few other birds are calling out (late morning, early evening), the dove’s gentle ooAAH, cooo, coo, coo wafts charmingly through the woods. The low-pitched call carries an impressively long distance through the trees. Sometimes I can hear three or four of them at scattered locations in the forest.

Over the past few years I have usually seen them in pairs (both sexes appear identical), the two of them always close and cordial companions. Lately, however, I’ve watched two doves duke it out at the feeder—one of them consistently bumptious and besting the other. What’s going on? It’s well past mating season, so it shouldn’t be two males competing for a female’s favors. I’m sure it can’t be the convivial mates in a squabble. I’ll just have to keep watching, and maybe the mystery will clear itself up some day. The closer I watch nature, the more I become aware of what I do not know.

Pete Dunne has spoiled me now. I can’t help looking at a mourning dove, chuckle over its “ridiculously” small head, and perceive it as a feeble-minded critter. When I do it seems to turn that “balefully black” eye on me, as if to ask who that pompous, nonflying dude with the fat head is.