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In late February, I began hearing the cooah cooo cooo coo sounds of a mourning dove (Zenaida macroura) on my early morning bike rides. Ornithologist Arthur Cleveland Bent once said, “Just as the mockingbird in the southern states bursts suddenly into song and separates winter from spring, so the male mourning dove, who has been silent through the winter, at the first hint of spring begins to coo.” The male begins cooing to establish a territory and attract a mate. In late February, as you may recall, the weather did not seem very springlike, but the temperature did climb above freezing for the first time in a very long while. And no one could deny that the days were getting longer.
Soon mourning doves will be nesting. In Massachusetts, the nesting season begins in late March, peaking in May and June. Windy spring storms destroy many early nests, so the later nests have a greater chance of success. Like robins, these birds build loose nests on a perch in a tree. The male selects the nest site. According to John James Audubon, the birds “make their nest in any kind of tree, on horizontal branches or twigs. It is formed of a few dry sticks, so loosely put together as to appear hardly sufficient to keep the eggs or young from falling.” To make the nest, the male carries grasses and twigs to the nest site. He stands on the female’s back to pass his items to her. She weaves these objects into a messy nest about 8 inches in diameter.
Like the common pigeon, female mourning doves lay two eggs. She sits on the eggs from late afternoon through the night and into the morning. The male incubates the eggs from about 10 a.m. until 3 p.m. One parent is always on the nest from the time the first egg is laid until the young are able to fend for themselves.
Male and female mourning doves provide food, called pigeon milk, for their two chicks, who are called squabs. Pigeon milk consists of fat-and protein-rich yellow curds that detach from a pouch inside the bird’s neck. At first, the chicks consume nothing but curds. After a few days, the pigeon milk contains more and more softened seeds. By the end of the second week, the hatchlings are ingesting mostly softened seeds and less than 2 percent curds.
Bent described the feeding process this way:
At 7:30 a.m., a squab raised its head and mutely begged for food. The adult (presumably the female) responded immediately by opening her beak and allowing the nestling to thrust its beak into one corner of her mouth. She then shut her beak and began a slow pumping motion of the head. The muscles of her throat twitched violently at intervals, continuing about a minute, when the nestling withdrew its beak. The other nestling then inserted its beak and the process was repeated, 15 seconds elapsing before its beak was removed. With intervals of 5 to 10 seconds four such feedings, two to each nestling, occurred … The entire process occupied about six minutes, after which the nestlings crawled back beneath the parent.
The squabs grow quickly on the rich pigeon milk and can fly in only two weeks. The nesting cycle of a mourning dove is not long: three to five days for nest building, two weeks for incubating the eggs and two weeks for caring for the young. Studies have shown that a nesting pair of mourning doves in Massachusetts successfully fledge about three birds per season.
Adult mourning doves eat seeds, searched out usually on the ground but at certain times of year extracted from pine cones by walking out on tree limbs.
Unlike the digestive system of deer, which breaks down seeds, the ones eaten by birds pass through the digestive tract unharmed – so mourning doves (and other birds) spread far and wide the seeds they eat.
Gardeners may not be happy to learn that mourning doves especially like eating bindweed seeds, the plant I sometimes feel as if I spend summers pulling from my garden.
“The crops of these birds are often so full of seeds that, if a bird is shot, the crop bursts open when it strikes the ground,” ornithologist Edward Howe Forbush said. “A Dove that was examined at the Department of Agriculture was found to contain ninety-two hundred seeds, mostly those of noxious weeds.”
Mourning doves fly away if you approach them. This is an indication that they have good vision and can see great distances. Audubon describes these birds as seldom flying far above the trees. They prefer to walk on the ground, along fences, or on tree branches. Mourning doves are one of the few types of birds that drink by sucking up water, immersing their bill in it up to their eyes to swallow.
Mourning doves are named because of their sad cooing sounds. Their feathers’ coloring being plain brownish with hints of blue-gray – with a few black spots on the wings and a small, dark crescent on their cheeks – they have been described as wearing drab Quaker clothing.
Some mourning doves migrate south in the winter, but data from banded birds indicates that 40 percent of adults in our area overwinter – adult males so they will have first crack at claiming a good breeding territory in the spring. These birds are not well-adapted for snow, though, and some lose their toes to frostbite. Mourning doves, unlike turkeys, cannot scratch through ice and snow to find seeds; they eat only what is visible on the ground. In snowy weather, mourning doves, therefore, congregate beneath backyard bird feeders, where they eat what spills onto the ground. Mourning doves that do migrate (immature doves and adult females) head south when there is a sudden drop in temperature, usually before the end of October.
The time is now to listen for the cooing of mourning doves. They are busy establishing territories and finding a mate. Soon they will be raising their first pair of chicks.
Have you taken photos of our urban wild things? Send your images to Cambridge Day, and we may use them as part of a future feature. Include the photographer’s name and the general location where the photo was taken.
Jeanine Farley is an educational writer who has lived in the Boston area for more than 30 years. She enjoys taking photos of our urban wild things.
The far left and far right of the background on the feature image to this post (not seen above) was generated digitally and is not real. The rabbit was photographed and is real.
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