Recently I was going through my bird photos looking at the variety of birds that have come to my yard over the years. Even though I can’t be certain of this fact, I feel that because birds have found my yard to be a consistent place where they can come to find food, they have passed on that knowledge to other generations of birds. I often see year after year, birds returning to my yard in the spring and during the winter they come to live in my trees so that they can have food,water and shelter for the winter.
One of the birds that I often see is the Mourning Dove. The photo shown is one of the beautiful ones that I captured. Until this morning, I was not certain if this bird was a male or female. That’s one reason that I like to single out a bird and learn more information about that individual bird.
This bird is a male because it has a slight pink tint to the feathers on its breast. The female’s breast feathers are gray. The difference between the two is ever so slight to human eyes, but I feel sure that it is pretty obvious to the Mourning Doves.
Mourning Doves are one of the birds that mate for life. That is one of the reasons that when you see one Mourning Dove, there is usually another one close by. Sometimes you can actually see them cuddle each other. Another name that is used for them is “turtle doves.” They are very graceful birds and this one that I photographed looks like a model that posed for me.
Mourning Doves eat seeds mostly and not insects. Even though this dove is in a tree, most of the time I see doves on the ground. They are actually called “ground foragers.” They are generally found underneath my feeders searching for seeds that have fallen from the feeders. I can’t think of any times that I have actually seen them fly up to my feeders, but occasionally they can be found eating seeds in a tray feeder on a table.
Even though they don’t rid our yards of insects, they are good to eat weed seeds. So they are good for taming the weeds that might spring up in our yards. They also enjoy eating larger seeds such as sunflower, cracked corn and shelled peanuts.
I was surprised by one of the features of this dove. Even though you may see it consuming a lot of seeds, it is actually stockpiling seeds to digest them later. They have a “crop” that is an enlarged portion of their esophagus where seeds are stored for later digestion. The bird pictured may have actually been on this perch so that it could digest the seeds that it had just consumed on the ground. In a Birds and Blooms article, it said, “Scientists once found a record-holding bird with 17,200 bluegrass seeds stuffed away in its crop.”
Mourning Doves aren’t large birds - only about 12” long with an 18” wingspan. This puts them in the medium size bird range. They don’t lay a lot of eggs. They generally lay only 2 eggs that incubate in about 2 weeks. They are good parents that work together taking care of their young. They produce something called “crop milk” that comes from their crop that looks similar to cottage cheese that they regurgitate into the baby bird’s mouth. But within 2 weeks it is all over and they begin to fledge.
I wondered why they are called Mourning Doves. It is the calming coo that it makes, which sometimes sounds mournful. I also love to hear the flutter sound of their wings as they fly from the ground to perch on a branch.
As you “Look at the birds of the air....” Matthew 6:26, I hope that you will find these lovely birds in your yard and now when you see them, you will appreciate them more.
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