As nonconsumptive admirers of cranes, I’m afraid we bird watchers will have to share them, until we come up with the resources and the resolve to save them—and their habitat—all for ourselves. Are we ready to do that? Yes, there are a lot of cranes now. Will there always be great flocks settling on the Platte? Will the Eastern Flyway ring with their calls; will we in the East one day be able to look up and see cranes migrating as a matter of course? It’s a good thing to wonder; to question accepted management practices; to challenge the conceit that state game agencies, in opening seasons on sandhill cranes, have an adequate grasp of crane population dynamics. It’s worth it, I think, to bring up the topic; to suffer the disapproving glances of nature lovers who’ve come only to worship at the crane mass; to challenge ourselves to look beyond the primeval beauty before us, toward the horizon beyond.
Mourning Dove
The Meatiest Songbird
THEY’RE MORE A HERD than a flock, these nineteen mourning doves that work my feeders. Every time I open the front door, I’m startled by a great winnowing roar of wings as they explode from the ground like a case of bottle rockets. Nineteen buffalo could make a quieter exit.
Depending on how you look at them, mourning doves are elegant, subtly colored, graceful beings; songbirds; walking birdseed vacuums; or tempting targets. They have their detractors, their passionate defenders, and even a place on some dinner tables. Some of us feed them; some of us feed on them. No wonder they seem a little paranoid, a wee bit too quick to flee. “You’re not just being paranoid,” I tell them. “We really are out to get you!”
Though they’d doubtless take issue if they could with their status as game birds in most states, the way we’ve changed the natural landscape apparently suits mourning doves well. They avoid heavily forested areas, preferring a patchwork of suburban and agricultural areas for feeding and nesting. Patchworks, we humans do very well. Mourning doves have expanded their range north and west just as settlers did. By 1900 they had moved from the southern half of the United States into New England, and they now breed across the southern tier of Canada.
Many observers are touched by the apparent devotion of the male mourning dove to his mate. Watch a pair for a while in April, and see if you don’t find that devotion bordering on obsession. A male dove guards his mate jealously, always a half step behind her as she tries to forage. He inflates his crop with air, flashing an evanescent rose pink and amber iridescence along the sides of his neck. He sometimes resorts to a comical crabbed hop as he strives to keep up with her. He’ll stop, lean forward, inflate his crop even fuller, and voice the sad coo that gives this bird its name: oooah, ooh, ooh, ooh. Odd that no one in the old ornithological literature seems to have put words to it; the song begs for a lyric. To me, it is a song of the South, of tall pines and dirt roads and long evenings heavy with honeysuckle. To most human ears, it speaks of longing and loss. It’s probably more a hopeful come-on for the doves.
Sex is never far from a mourning dove’s mind, nor should it be for a species that’s been recorded nesting successfully in every month of the year. I remember trying to focus my binoculars on a female gathering nesting material in a blowing snowstorm. It was late January in Connecticut. I’ve picked up freshly pipped mourning dove eggshells in April and September.
There’s a slapdash quality to the doves’ whole reproductive scheme that might seem maladaptive. Sloppiness is a hallmark of mourning dove nesting; an inexperienced hen may find one of her two eggs falling through the nest’s see-through bottom. But burgeoning dove populations indicate that the birds are doing something right. The researcher David Blockstein outlined a suite of adaptations to high reproductive output in mourning doves. Small, flimsy, quickly built nests, often reused, house two small eggs per clutch. Males produce greater quantities of crop milk, a nutritious secretion of the crop lining that nourishes the young, than do their mates. Females put their energy into the next clutch. Nestlings grow phenomenally quickly; they’re feathered and starting to fly at fifteen days. By the time the two young fledge, the female may well be incubating a second clutch. While she’s thus occupied, the male is feeding the fledglings from the first. Blockstein found that mourning dove nesting cycles are 22 percent shorter than would be predicted for birds of their body mass. These smooth, tawny birds are geared to high production. According to the 1989 North American Breeding Bird Survey, the species ranked second only to the red-winged blackbird in the number of survey routes in which it was encountered.
In any conversation about mourning doves, at least in my family, the subject of their IQ invariably comes up. I caught my own mother recently calling doves “notoriously dumb,” and my eldest sister, an avid bird feeder, refers to them as “dippies,” a nickname applied when she’d find them milling about in her Plexitopped windowsill feeder, bumping their heads on the clear ceiling as they strove to find their way back out. The size of a mourning dove’s head relative to its body does little to bolster my case for its intellect. I think, though, that this nasty rumor arises in part from the mourning doves’ escape strategy. They crouch until the last second, then, with a rush and rattle of wings, startle the predator into abandoning its pursuit. This happens to be a highly effective plan when employed on mammalian and avian predators, but it does seem a bit outdated when used in defense against speeding automobiles. Still . . . ever hit a mourning dove? Me neither. Rest assured that, while they’re sitting there looking stupid, the doves are busy assessing the approaching threat and choosing the best moment to employ their startle defense.
As an ombudsman for mourning doves, I feel especially qualified. I’ve raised and released three orphans. The first came to me as a naked nestling, barely the size of a fifty-cent piece, when I was eighteen. My father, who had raised a few pigeons as a boy, helped me concoct a slurry of half-and-half, hard-boiled egg yolk, ground oatmeal, and ground sunflower hearts, which I administered through a bulb syringe. It worked fabulously. The nestling slept on a curtain rod or, more typically, on my chest under my chin; grew and flew; made the Sunday Richmond Times-Dispatch’s front page; and even came back to visit on July 4, two weeks after I’d last seen it fly off. It was a bird-teenager bonding experience to remember.
The second one blew from her nest in 1999 in a sudden May squall, and I watched her wandering sulkily around the patio for a day, pecking about but finding no food, until she lay down, too weak to rise. I sighed, picked her up, let my then-three-year-old daughter name her (Cookie), and fed her with a syringe until she was ready to pick up millet and chick scratch. Released, she became a delightful addition to our sanctuary. She spent much of the day sheltering in a roofed wooden bird feeder we put out for her, pecking savagely at any other mourning dove that dared to intrude in her retreat. With each day, she flew higher, faster, and harder, trying her newfound freedom and her strong young wings, but she sat still for little Phoebe’s friendly approach, preening companionably as they sat together on the deck.
The 2010 dove came to me through a phone call, having fallen from its nest fifteen feet up on the tip of a pine bough into a yard with seven free-roaming cats. Since replacing it in the nest was impossible, I had to raise it. The dove traveled with us to a West Virginia birding festival, where I was busy dawn to dusk. Phoebe, then thirteen, syringe-fed Libby Lou through all my commitments. Back home, the foundling became a pleasant fixture in the studio, sitting on the arm of my lamp or on my shoulder as I painted. I strewed seed on the ground just outside the studio window, bringing in a small flock of mourning doves that cooed and courted in the spring sun. I painted them from life with Libby sitting warm on my shoulder, gently fussing with strands of my hair and nibbling my ear. As a bird artist, I have to say it doesn’t get any better than that.
Mourning doves are easy to raise; commercial parrot hand-rearing formulas, mixed up with warm water to the consistency of yogurt and fed through a plastic syringe, work fine. You can load a baby dove up, filling its crop with food, and go about your business for a
couple of hours. It’s a nice contrast to raising insectivorous birds, which need food every half-hour. I offer millet-based seed mix and a little fine grit in shallow dishes. Mourning doves instinctively pick up their own food starting around seventeen days of age and are reliably self-feeding by about Day 30. Affectionate and even petlike as squabs, they nevertheless transition well to the wild, making longer and longer forays from home on their own. Rather than break it suddenly, Libby and I stretched our bond. I stopped supplemental syringe feeding at Day 32, then moved the orphan outdoors to a nylon flight tent at Day 36. I zipped the tent walls open at Day 40. Libby flew out, perched in the birches for a few hours, then took off like an arrow, heading east, around noon. She was gone until 8:00 P.M., when she came down, famished and trembling, to eat and drink. Crop filled, she flew back into her tent for the night.
For the next week, she’d take a different compass direction each day, seemingly exploring the surrounding area. She’d drop into the yard before dusk, to the relative safety of the fledging tent. Not about to donate my month of hard work to a screech-owl, I brought her inside the studio for seven nights. I enjoyed those last sweet evenings of contact with my wild foundling. Yes, we’d made a pet of her, but I knew her nature would triumph in the end. She spent her first night outside on Day 51 and ceased to come in at dusk from then on. On June 1, Day 52, she began seeking out the company of other doves and found one she liked—a juvenile the same age. This is just what wild mourning doves do—form small flocks of juveniles that learn about independence together.
Watching Libby sitting shoulder to shoulder with another juvenile, preening companionably and occasionally touching bills, was a full-circle moment. As much as we’d fussed over her and walked around with her balancing on our shoulders or heads; as much as we loved to bury our noses in her warm, seedy-smelling back feathers; we had always known she’d go back to the wild, for it was where she belonged. Still, I laughed to see her learning vigilance behavior from the wild doves. I’d walk out onto the deck to refill the feeders, and they’d all take off in a cacophony of whistling wings. Only one would remain: Libby, her small head jerking back and forth, looking for the threat. “What? What? Oh . . . that? That’s just Mom!”
Though I have my pick of birds to paint, birds that are more colorful or impressive, I am drawn to mourning doves. I’ve watched them grow up in my hands, and I’ve exulted when they have left me, to whistle through the air with their own kind. Drawing them from life, choosing which of their graceful poses to paint, is pure pleasure. Yes, they’re common, even abundant, but part of my coming of age as a bird watcher and a painter is learning to settle down and appreciate what is wonderful in the familiar. Mourning doves have a dancer’s poise and unconscious grace. Their rounded contours and soft colors, I think, make them beautiful from any angle. More than this, they’ve taken this altered landscape and made it their own.
It’s that adaptability and abundance, in part, that gets mourning doves on the wrong end of a gun in many states. They’re the only “game” birds to nest in all forty-eight contiguous states. They’re members of a family, the Columbidae, that, being outside the taxonomic pale of songbirds, find themselves among the hunted. The language of lobbyists on both sides of the dove-hunting question is a semantic minefield. “Don’t shoot them! They’re songbirds!” the antihunting faction cries. However fervently they protest, doves aren’t passerines, or songbirds. Yes, they have a mellow song, but the structure of their feet, the number of their tail feathers (fourteen rather than twelve), and certain properties of their spermatozoa put them in a more primitive order. Woodpeckers and whip-poor-wills aren’t songbirds, either, but nobody’s shooting at them.
So what is it that makes us call mourning doves game birds? Well, they’re edible, if you can get enough of them. They’re brown; they look like game birds. (I’ve always wondered if we would think about shooting them if they were blue or bright red. But remember that its slate blue and peach beauty did nothing to save the passenger pigeon from extermination.) Most important, it seems, they’re fast—from thirty up to fifty-five miles per hour in timed flights. They’re hard to hit, and, by extrapolation, they must be fun to try to hit.
If I sound like someone who doesn’t hunt, well, I am. In fact, I once was asked by the Marietta League of Women Voters to speak on a local cable TV channel about why I thought it would be a bad idea to reinstate mourning dove hunting in Ohio. It had been banned in 1917, voted back in 1975, then banned again from 1976 until 1994, when the sportsmen’s shooting lobby got a season passed by one vote in a lame-duck senate. It seems the Ohio populace at large had a certain amount of ambivalence about the practice as well. In 1998, Ohio citizens gathered over three hundred thousand signatures to attempt to repeal the dove-hunting season with a ballot proposal. And I was thinking the issue through, trying to come up with a good argument to support my gut feeling about shooting doves.
This was an unexpectedly educational experience. First, I had to examine why I object to dove hunting. I knew the populations have been proven to sustain their numbers in spite of hunting. In 2003, the yearly harvest was 20 million nation-wide, of a fall population that’s estimated from 350 to 475 million birds. They’re hunted in thirty-eight of the forty-eight contiguous states, and they’re still abundant. But for parts of the West, where slight declines are being registered, the birds’ reproductive strategies more than keep up with the harvest. When I really thought about it, I decided that I had two defensible concerns: the incidental kill of other species that might be mistaken for mourning doves and the question of whether mourning doves were being consumed by the hunters who shot them.
Examining the ballot arguments for and against continuing the doves’ protected status, I learned some things I hadn’t known about mourning doves. From my work skinning window-killed doves while preparing museum specimens, I knew that a mourning dove is twelve inches long, and six of those twelve inches are made up of tail feathers. An average adult weighs four and a half ounces. Since the dove’s drumstick hardly merits the name, measuring less than an inch long, the breast meat is all that’s used. Each breast fillet is about as long as my thumb and weighs one ounce or less before cooking. These already cracker-size hors d’oeuvres lose further weight and volume in the process.
I stared at the pro-hunting ballot issue. It stated: “One dove equals ten large shrimp, one chicken leg, two chicken wings, 2½ wieners, three sausage patties or one bratwurst.” Wow, I thought. Either they’re comparing dove fillets to Vienna sausages or the legs and wings of newly hatched chickens, or there’s something I have to learn about mourning doves. Since chicken parts vary a lot in size, and I didn’t know how big those sausage patties or bratwursts were, I decided to go weigh a wiener. I dug one out of the refrigerator. Fifty-six grams, or 1.97 ounces. Two and a half wieners weighed 4.92 ounces. Hmm. That’s more than a whole dove weighs. A whole mourning dove breast weighs 2 ounces, or about a wiener’s worth of meat. As far as I could tell, the ballot literature overstated the dove’s edible meatiness by 250 percent. Unless, I concluded, you were to eat the whole dove, wings, feet, tail, feathers, and all.
A few days later, armed with my wiener-weighing data, I sat, quietly sweating in a gray pinstriped pantsuit, notes in hand, under blinding television lights. The cameraperson asked me to look straight into the lights and relax as I made my case. Right. I took some comfort in the fact that the opposition speaker had actual rivulets of sweat running down his face. I made my points one by one, starting with incidental kill. I stated that, although I study birds for a living, I misidentify flying mourning doves on a nearly daily basis. At fifty miles per hour or more, it takes a second, and sometimes third, look through my binoculars to identify them. The autumn dove shoot takes place as hawks, falcons, blue jays, robins, and flickers are all migrating. If I can’t tell right off whether I’m looking at a kestrel or a mourning dove, could an excited hunter using only his naked eye make a correct identification?
I m
oved on to the meatiness factor, citing a recipe in The Joy of Cooking that calls for four to eight birds to serve a single person. A shooter would have to down two dozen birds to feed a family of four. I suggested that, given the bird’s demonstrably small food value and famously swift flight, mourning dove hunting might have more to do with shooting than with eating.
On to the useful bird argument. Mourning doves eat weed seeds and waste grain in cultivated fields, competing with rodents for these food sources. One dove’s stomach was found to contain 7,500 yellow wood sorrel seeds, and another had 6,400 foxtail grass seeds. They’re beneficial, or at the very least harmless to agriculture. I wound up my talk encouraging Ohio voters to restore the protected status mourning doves had enjoyed for all but two of the past eighty years.
My opponent spoke next. I learned that people who opposed dove hunting were members of the organized animal-rights movement, which opposes using animals for farming, medical research, even fishing, circuses, and zoos! Oh. I’d thought I was just a bird watcher. Worse, he said, we were vegetarians, determined to take meat from all American tables. I couldn’t suppress a small snort, as I thought of myself extracting, then weighing a wiener from my own refrigerator. In certain seasons, there might have been venison, a gift from hunter friends, in that same refrigerator. Ah, well. I’d done my best. We’d see what happened when the issue hit the polls.
The Bluebird Effect Page 22