Ubiquitous Cooers
BIRD BRAINS: Inside the Strange Minds of Our Fine Feathered Friends (ISBN: 978-0-7267-8755-5)
by
Budd Titlow
If you stay attuned to the sounds of the natural world, you’ll always know when mourning doves are around. They’re named for their lamenting, drawn-out cooing calls—woo-OO-oo-oo-oo, woo-OO-oo-oo-oo, woo-OO-oo-oo-oo—which are often mistaken for owl hoots. Plus their wings make sharp whistling or whinnying sounds whenever they take off.
Nesting in every US state except Alaska and Hawaii, mourning doves can be seen just about anywhere you look in open country, including most rural and suburban settings. Plus they spend a lot of their time perching on power lines and feeding on turfgrass lawns.
Meandering warily along, a Mourning Dove (Zenaida macroura) gobbles up leftover grain in a farm field. (Photo Copyright: Budd Titlow / NATUREGRAPHS)
Ninety-nine percent of a mourning dove’s diet consists of grass and weed seeds, which they store in their enlarged esophagi—called crops. Researchers studying dove feeding habits found that the record for storage in a single crop was more than seventeen thousand bluegrass seeds.
Mourning doves are the most hunted bird in North America. At least twenty million doves (out of an astounding total of 350 million doves nationwide) are killed annually for sport and eating in the US[TH1] . Their flight is bullet straight and rocket fast (up to fifty-five miles per hour), with many quick darts, descents, ascents, and dodges thrown in for good measure. For hunters, this adds a special challenge to any dove shoot; those who can bring down at least one dove for every two shots are considered excellent marksmen.
Two things allow doves to maintain and steadily increase their populations in the face of such withering hunting pressure. First, they easily adapt to just about anything humans do to the natural landscape. Since doves generally avoid thick woodlands, clearing forests actually increases the amount of habitat available for their feeding and nesting. Plus, in warmer climates, a nesting pair of doves typically produces an incredible six broods—that’s twelve new squabs—each spring. With this prolific annual repopulation ratio (six-to-one), it’s probably a good thing that hunters kill so many adult doves each year. Otherwise, they might soon overrun the whole country!
Like all dove species worldwide, the mourning dove is usually associated with tranquillity, being official symbols of peace in both Wisconsin and Michigan. But with their delicately curving heads and bodies, these birds only look like they’re peaceful. If you spend any time watching mourning doves feed, you’ll notice that most other songbirds keep their distance and let doves go wherever they want. Doves also always aggressively defend their nesting territories, walking around with their chests puffed out and chasing away any other birds that dare to venture near.
Mated pairs of mourning doves also engage in some memorable behavior. Male birds collect nesting materials and bring them to the female birds who build the nests. Nothing really unusual about this so far, but here’s the strange part. The male bird often stands on the back of the female bird while she’s assembling the nest, sort of like a job foreman supervising on-site construction work. Then when the chicks hatch, both parents produce “crop milk”—a nutritious and fatty cottage cheese–like substance—that they feed the young while they’re in the nest.
Even though mourning doves live everywhere in the US, they have been always strongly associated with rural southern landscapes. As Julie Zickefoose so eloquently puts it in her book The Bluebird Effect: “[The dove’s song] is a song of the south, of tall pines and dirt roads and long evenings heavy with honeysuckle.”
Text excerpted from book: BIRD BRAINS: Inside the Strange Minds of Our Fine Feathered Friends, written by Budd Titlow and published by Lyons Press (an imprint of Globe Pequot Press).
Author’s bio: For the past 50 years, professional ecologist and conservationist Budd Titlow has used his pen and camera to capture the awe and wonders of our natural world. His goal has always been to inspire others to both appreciate and enjoy what he sees. Now he has one main question: Can we save humankind’s place — within nature’s beauty — before it’s too late? Budd’s two latest books are dedicated to answering this perplexing dilemma. PROTECTING THE PLANET: Environmental Champions from Conservation to Climate Change, a non-fiction book, examines whether we still have the environmental heroes among us — harking back to such past heroes as Audubon, Hemenway, Muir, Douglas, Leopold, Brower, Carson, and Meadows — needed to accomplish this goal. Next, using fact-filled and entertaining story-telling, his latest book — COMING FULL CIRCLE: A Sweeping Saga of Conservation Stewardship Across America — provides the answers we all seek and need. Having published five books, more than 500 photo-essays, and 5,000 photographs, Budd Titlow lives with his music educator wife, Debby, in San Diego, California.
This Birding Life 