When it comes to mourning doves, the world agrees with my usual instinct: the most essential thing to do is listen. There are appearances, there are the habits of one’s day, and there are the actions of one’s life, but few aspects of a bird or person make as indelible an impact as a voice. With different birds, different people may hear different things, form varying impressions. But in the case of the mourning dove, what almost everyone seems to hear is melancholy and yearning.
Also invisible but invariably present at some indefinable distance are the mourning doves whose plaintive call suggests irresistibly a kind of seeking-out, the attempt by separated souls to restore a lost communion.
– Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire 1
This is their song, their central act of courtship. Since doves are technically outside of the passerine or “songbird” group, and since their songs are quite different from the high-pitched and often elaborate whistles of our most well-known singers, you will sometimes see this vocalization misleadingly referred to as a call, or technically as a “perch coo.” Cooing, of course, is not inherently a technical word, but a popular one, one that immediately conveys a whole host of connotations to a general public that is often indifferent to the voices of birds. Cooing suggests an affection that is supremely gentle, sometimes to the point of cloying forcelessness. Or, in the case of a cooing mourning dove, a longing that is unusually tinged with pathos.
This is probably the most widely recognized bird sound on the continent, the one for which more humans could summon up the exact species name of the singer than for any other, given the bird’s evocative title. Not just a dove, as one might recognize a hoot as belonging to an owl, or a quack as belonging to a duck, but the cooing song of a mourning dove. It helps the learning process that this is a very uniform song, one that follows a reliable pattern: first a slurred phrase that rises to an expansive, higher, second syllable and then falls back into three separate, trailing off coos (occasionally only two, or four, but usually three):
coo-AAAHH coo… coo… coo…
At the end, listen for their next most familiar sound: the wing whistle
What is important to recognize is that the song, as well as loud, flapping display flights, are acts of courtship, behaviors primarily undertaken by unmated males to advertise themselves, either generally or in appeal to a particular female who has captured their focused attention. Once the pair bond is established these behaviors largely cease, with cooing becoming 80–90% less frequent . (There is, as usual, some more subtlety in the details: mated males occasionally pull out the perch coo for incidental duties, such as territorial warnings to intruder males or to summon the kids for feeding, and there may be some upswings in cooing between nesting cycles with the same mate.) Abbey and other poeticizers of birdsong who hear some form of lonely yearning in this cooing are not entirely wrong.
Overall, our first impression of desolated solitude is in this case substantially closer to the mark than that other rich vein of human misinterpretation—that singing birds are “happy.”
Do not waste any sympathy on this incessant love-maker that slowly sings coo-o-o, ah-coo-o-o-ooo-o-o-ooo-o-o, in a sweetly sad voice. Really he is no more melancholy than the plaintive pewee but, on the contrary, is so happy in his love that his devotion has passed into a proverb.
– Neltje Blanchan, Birds Every Child Should Know, 1907
Blanchan is trying to be scientific, for her time. She is trying to tell us not to be misled by that superficial melancholy sound. But she is actually quite wrong. When monogamous bliss is established, the cooing largely ceases. This is a song that the lonely sing.
What comes after: the proverbial devotion is true
O my dove, in the clefts of the rock,
In the secret place of the steep pathway,
Let me see your form,
Let me hear your voice;
For your voice is sweet,
And your form is lovely.
– Song of Solomon 2:14
Écoutez-moi; je vais vous donner un conseil: adorez-vous. Je ne fais pas un tas de giries, je vais au but, soyez heureux. Il n’y a pas dans la création d’autres sages que les tourtereaux. Les philosophes disent: Modérez vos joies. Moi je dis: Lâchez-leur la bride, à vos joies.
Listen to me; I’m going to give you a piece of advice: adore each other. I’m not one to dance around my point, I go straight to it: be happy. The only sages in creation are the turtle doves. The philosophers say: moderate your joys. I say: give them full rein.
– Victor Hugo, Les Misérables
Two turrrr-ttttllle do-oo-ooves!
– “The Twelve Days of Christmas”
In the rich history of human-dove culture, there are a few recurring themes. The first is intense romantic fidelity and affection. You see this idea all over western cultural history, often referring to the turtle dove (“turtle” and French tourterelle are adaptations of the ultimately onomatopoeic Latin word for doves, turtur), but largely applicable to the family in general. Our mourning doves do perform their mournful cries before the bond is firmly established. But once it is, they launch whole-heartedly into a quieter form of textbook billing, cooing, and domestic felicity.
Within the season, mourning doves clearly maintain a pair bond, with more active bonding behaviors than any bird I have yet talked about, the kinds of maintenance activities that marriage counselors probably recommend for long-term healthy relationships. (Mourning dove nesting season can extend to an avianly epochal time frame, upwards of six months.) There is some evidence that mourning doves also maintain a looser bond with their partner during the winter, within the flock, and often renest with the same bird in the following year. Absolute consensus on this seems to be elusive, though, with the main complicating factor seeming to be that adults only survive for a year on average, meaning that many birds have to re-pair simply because mutual survival is not the norm. Divorce is rare; widowing is common.
In other words, doves exhibit not just a yearning, but a commitment to continuance. This is less vocal, but it is quite visible.
The famous perch coos come before nesting. But once nesting begins, the dove couple is a model of constant cozy collaboration.
- During nest site selection, they perform quieter “nest coos.” Typically, the male will take the lead in site selection, flying to a potential location and then summoning the female to inspect it with a quieter version of the first half of the perch coo.
- He will continue giving these nest coos during the construction process, which is the ultimate example of cooperative endeavor. The male usually gathers the sticks and other materials, flies to the nest site, lands on the female’s back, and passes her the items for her judicious placement. Sometimes she’ll stand on his back.
- Throughout the nesting cycle, mourning doves conduct regular sessions of side-by-side preening, preening of each other (referred to with complete accuracy in pre-70s studies as “caressing”; nowadays as “allopreening”), and mock feeding of their partner.
- They take care of the eggs and young in a very egalitarian way, with each member of the pair taking a shift on incubation duty and with both contributing to the feeding of the nestlings.
This approach to nesting is extremely successful, allowing up to six broods to be raised sequentially in a single season (where the climate allows a six month breeding season, including most of California, from mid-March to mid-September). Many birds raise only one or two broods each year, with a consequently much quicker fading of intimacy and domestic enthusiasm.
Now, there are other factors that enable doves’ practice of what has been unsentimentally termed “production line” breeding. Everything happens quickly: nests are minimal and are usually constructed in two or three days. “The ‘genius’ of a dove’s nest is that it does not look like a nest at all,” as Bernd Heinrich puts it. They can be so slight because they only need to hold two eggs; a small brood can be concealed by the body of a parent, fed liberally, grow rapidly, and fledge quickly (about 12 days from hatching to leaving the nest).
For the first week or so, young are fed mostly “crop milk” or “pigeon milk,” a nutritious secretion of partially digested food from the crop of both parents, which allows a larger proportion of the year to be used for nesting, unlike birds that require insect foods with a more limited window of abundance. And in general, the strictly seed-eating diet of doves allows a longer period of generally plentiful food, extending into early fall, compared to insectivorous birds. Heinrich sums up the strategic coherence of the entire process:
My observations of these birds—their minimal nest; covering of eggs, young, and feces; freezing of all motion; absence of any begging vocalizations of the chicks; very fast growth; and staying in the nest until expert flight was possible—all point to predator avoidance as a unifying strategy. Predator avoidance may also explain the structure of the nest, the number of eggs, and the crop feeding, as well as the obsessive nest sitting. This strategy requires the presence of the male to provision the sitting female and to relieve her at the nest. Without a partner, it would not be possible.
– The Nesting Season
There is, in other words, a secret to their success, an essential current running through their entire playbook: cooperation between the pair, motivated by constant bond-reinforcing activities. In many birds, males play a smaller role in raising the young, spending their time feeding themselves, singing, or in some cases simply leaving everything to the female, as in ducks and hummingbirds. But male doves take their full share of incubation duties (there is no female-only brood patch) and their full share of feeding responsibility (both sexes are “milk” producers). After fledging, the male essentially takes over feeding the young for another two weeks as they toddle about the brave new world with their siblings, allowing the mother to focus her attention on her own nutrition and to quickly lay new eggs.
“Production line” sounds very mechanical and devoid of tenderness. It was a term we came up with to describe efficiency, which is to say effectiveness, which in the end comes down to this: cooperation works better. Two are more successful than one. Some specialization of tasks can help, but a generally equal balance of responsibility maximizes the family potential. So if you thought that all that tender nibbling was mere sentimental dressing, consider this solid fact: from eggs to independents, six broods a year!
The second dove tradition: the gentle victims
After romantic fidelity, the other through-line of doves in human culture is their role as symbols of gentle meekness and helpless innocence. This is also an old, old story.
Here Hecuba, with all her helpless train
Of dames, for shelter sought, but sought in vain.
Driv’n like a flock of doves along the sky,
Their images they hug, and to their altars fly.
– Aeneid 2.516–517, in Dryden’s classic translation, describing the flight of the Trojan women before the enraged Greeks, praecipites atra ceu tempestate columbae, “driven like doves before a black storm”
Behold, I send you out as sheep in the midst of wolves; so be shrewd as serpents and innocent as doves.
– Matthew 10:16, a few chapters before Christ heads to the temple to rid it of two pestilential professions, the moneylenders and “those who were selling doves”
Too blindly have we reared a viper for a nightingale, and ground corn for the raven that was meant for the dove.
– Tristan, Gottfried von Strassburg. Thus speaks the queen when she realizes that her houseguest and recipient of her medical attentions had killed her brother-in-law. A good one to pull out when you next suffer a Great Betrayal. “I ground corn for you as for a dove, but now I see you as you are, you viper!”
—to take a somewhat arbitrary smattering from various assorted times and places within the our cultural heritage. One could find endless examples of a revealing consistency, considering the wide discrepancies of the overall cultures from which these samples arose. Whether in Rome, Jerusalem, or Germany; whether before Christ, in the first century, or in the second millenium, doves are the helpless ones, the innocent victims who we would succour, if we could.
What is it that inspires this idea of the gentle mildness of doves? More or less everything about them. Their immediate visual impression is of an inoffensive and often somewhat hapless character, with a tiny head and large eyes that give them an expression ranging from innocent to foolish. Their characteristic mode of locomotion is a short-legged waddle, an inefficient and therefore ridiculous vision.
On the ground doves walk with a dainty tripping motion, their pink feet raising the body only slightly off the ground.
– Hoffman on the mourning dove, Birds of the Pacific States
They are dainty with a dash of clumsiness, incapable of focused speed or directed aggression. This bears out in their life history: doves can’t pursue prey of any kind and are to all intents and purposes vegetarians. The only time they move quickly is to flee, which they do often and ably (see my account of our Wild Pigeons for more on their speed of escape). In the nesting season they associate in the intimate pairs described above, while for the rest of the year they gather into generally tolerant flocks. While there is a social hierarchy within the flock, the intra-flock aggression of occasional hunched waddles that accelerate to a fearsome 5 mph, perhaps culminating in the occasional poke with a blunt beak, appear to us with a fair degree of accuracy as largely impotent, comical gestures.
The relations of doves and humans in actual historical practice have greatly amplified our sense of these birds as victims. For most of civilized history, those relations have taken two forms: captivity and domestication, or death and consumption. Doves have sometimes been kept as passingly ornamental birds ultimately destined for the table or ceremonial purposes (from Old Testament sacrifice to modern wedding releases) and at other times for their message-bearing capacity (genetically, our city pigeons or rock doves are that main “carrier pigeon” species, well-equipped with the requisite speed, size, docility, and homing instinct).
At other times they have been caught or shot in the wild for food, most famously on this continent in the example of the passenger pigeon, which was driven to extinction by a combination of habitat change and direct harvest. Today, the mourning dove is one of the most widely hunted birds in North America, with an annual take of some 10 million birds. It’s the only one of your typical backyard feeding station visitors who might be shot this fall: all the songbirds are protected by law. Some of these relationships between doves and humans are therefore straightforward and unsentimental ones of food and consumer, while others have allowed a modicum of indulgent affection to intrude within the process, but all cases seem to make clear that one party is firmly in charge, with the other at its rarely forthcoming mercy.
The mourning dove fits squarely within this tradition, in most senses a fair general exemplar rather than a radical exception from the family norms. The small-headed, short-legged, fast-flying form of a fleer? Yes. The gentle demeanor, strict vegetarianism, and pitiful cooing voice? Certainly. A seemingly irresistible temptation for hunters? Apparently.
A steady story of helpless victims. But what makes the story interesting is that it frequently is a story—that we people are both the perpetrators of the violence and the sympathetic framers of the doves’ victimhood. Biblical admonitions to dove-like mildness follow injunctions to dove sacrifice. Advocates of hunters debate with advocates of doves. The two trends have always existed in some tension, but after several millennia of fluctuating balance, the scales seem now to be tipping in the doves’ favor. The sacrifices have ended, hunting is waning, and if Dawson in 1923 seemed part of a sentimental minority, his underlying point of view is now increasingly the accepted norm:
The real question is, how can you endure to quench that voice,—that haunting, wistful, friendly voice? … Or how shall gentleness—for the Mourning Dove is the most perfect exemplar of that sovereign grace—how shall gentleness survive on earth at all, if we meet it so with shot and shell? Is it a pleasure to be shunned by gentle creatures? To move always along a path of terror? To feel the woodland grow silent before us? To live, in short, in an empty world?
In the first century after our country’s founding, we wiped out the wild populations of our most majestic dove, the passenger pigeon—but then we passed laws and treaties and said we will not do this again. In our second century, we were warned of a silent spring—and we acted, saving the pelican, the peregrine, and the eagle from their trend towards extinction. Today, the threats have multiplied and dispersed, grown less singular and harder to combat; birds and insects and plants of many species steadily decline.
But we can say this: we now recognize in doves those who need our help and we would not actively deny it. The modern hunter tracks the population and sets limits to their season, while the number of the hunters naturally decreases. And it is neither ferocity nor force that changes human minds, but these ever-gentle birds with their imploring, helpless voices.
The doves flee before the tempest, but when the wind comes round we see it take the form of a great cloud of flapping wings.
The meek inherit
We live, one could argue, in a great age of the dove, or at least a post-passenger pigeon renaissance. Mourning doves are the most abundant bird in North America (some estimates exceed 400 million). Rock doves have colonized the world with several hundred million of their kind, often in places where few birds can thrive. And now a new dove, the Eurasian collared-dove, is adding another cooing voice across America.
They are tied up together, those two traditional traits: the intense pair bonds and the helpless, gentle natures. The first leads to their success, while the second points to their frailty, should we humans be the aggressors. When faced with human violence, it is true that doves fall as easy victims. But when that danger is removed, their well-honed instinct of flight is usually a highly effective means of self-preservation. And when that gentleness is respected, rather than taken advantage of, it seems that these become birds of unparalleled success.
In some circles this is bemoaned. Pigeons, originally cliff-nesting rock doves of Southern Europe and North Africa, are now ubiquitous urban residents around the world. 30 Eurasian collared-doves were released in the Bahamas in the 1970s and have now spread across North America. The keys to their success are largely the same as those discussed here: a strategy of rapidly-repeated nesting enabled by highly cooperative parenting.
What is often overlooked by the native-species purists is that the story of the mourning dove is not so dissimilar. These birds have also been expanding their range, almost entirely without ecological disapproval. Every state except North Dakota now has year-round mourning doves, according to the latest range maps; this did not use to be the case. A hundred years ago, there were essentially no breeding mourning doves in Canada. Now they are common in half a dozen provinces. This is not primarily a climate change-triggered movement; it is a human settlement movement: mourning doves have also established themselves on Puerto Rico and multiple Caribbean islands where they formerly were not.
Dawson warned against a terrible fate, of living in a silent world, emptied of the songs of doves. And there is, they say, less birdsong than there once was. The specialists have suffered. We are losing insects, and the birds that feed on them. All of this is to be lamented. What can be preserved should be preserved; what can be restored should be restored. But I will not scorn the gifts we have.
When cooperation breeds resilience, when diligent nurture can make up for diminished nature, when a voice is heard to sing not less, but more—then I will listen and be glad. Have our skies lost certain stars, and are there more to lose? I cannot deny it, but I cannot spend my days caught up in endless regret.
And if there is any voice to teach this, it is this one that cries, but then is found. For there is an end to mourning when there is living to be done.
Header photo by Nicole Beaulac
Astoundingly beautiful, insightful & sweet…what a great beginning to this day…thank you, Jack!
Thank you Chris!
Just who is this “Jack,” masterful writer of such good stories of birds and their hominid admirers? Surely a short orinthological-literary bio is in order!
Hmm, I may be able to compose some such thing at some point. On the other hand, the bird essays have already revealed my thoughts on literature, philosophy, film, music, economics, travel, love, friendship, death, and most other subjects, so how much would the typical trivia add? I may maintain my veil of mystery a little longer. But I’m glad you are enjoying the bird stories!
I greatly enjoyed this article