When it comes to mourning doves, the world agrees with my usual instinct: the most essential thing to do is listen. And what almost everyone seems to hear in their namesake voice is melancholy and yearning.
Their “plaintive call suggests irresistibly a kind of seeking out, the attempt by separated souls to restore a lost communion,” wrote environmental author Edward Abbey. And he’s not all wrong. This is their song, their central act of courtship, a behavior primarily undertaken by unmated males to advertise themselves and cure themselves of loneliness. It’s a familiar sound, one that follows a reliable pattern as an opening note swells into an expansive, higher second syllable, then falls back down into three trailing-off coos: “coo-AAAHH-coo … coo … coo.”
In the rich history of human-dove culture, there are a few recurring themes. Along with a general impression of gentle innocence, the other prominent idea is one of intense romantic fidelity and affection: think of the two turtle doves in the “12 Days of Christmas,” the association of doves and weddings or the extension of the word “cooing” to figurative use for cloyingly gentle expressions of tenderness. If you watch paired doves closely, you can find plenty of cause for this reputation.
Once pairs are established, the cooing greatly diminishes and doves switch to a suite of quieter behaviors that continually reinforce a strong pair bond, which often fizzles out more quickly in other birds. Males perform soft, abbreviated “nest coos” during the nest construction process, which is the ultimate example of cooperative coziness. The usual pattern is for the male to gather the materials, fly to the nest site, land on the female’s back and pass her the sticks for her judicious placement.
Throughout the nesting cycle, mourning doves conduct regular sessions of partner feeding, side-by-side preening and preening of each other (referred to with complete accuracy in pre-1970s studies as “caressing,” nowadays as “allopreening”). They also take care of the eggs and young in an egalitarian way, with each bird taking a shift on incubation duty and with both contributing to the feeding of the nestlings.
This collaborative approach to nesting is extremely successful, allowing up to six broods to be raised over a long, six-month nesting season. The close, ongoing bond and active cooperation is key, along with other factors that enable doves’ practice of what has been unsentimentally termed “production line breeding.” Although that phrase sounds utterly devoid of tenderness, it accurately describes their efficiency, which in the end comes down to this: cooperation works better. 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 effectiveness of this approach extends across much of the dove family. One could argue that we live in a great age of doves, or at least in a post-passenger pigeon renaissance. Rock doves (our familiar city pigeons) 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.
This spread of foreign doves is sometimes bemoaned. But one thing that is often missed is that the story of the native mourning dove is quite similar. These birds have also been expanding their range. There are now year-round mourning doves in almost every state and breeding doves in half a dozen Canadian provinces where they did not previously occur. They are thought to currently be the most abundant bird in North America, with some estimates exceeding 400 million individuals. This expansion has been enabled by human settlement, since doves thrive in both agricultural areas and near enough every level of suburban development.
Obviously, this is not the norm among the world’s wildlife. There are fewer birds than there once were. The specialists have suffered. We are losing insects, and the birds that feed on them. But, I don’t 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.
Jack Gedney’s On the Wing runs every other Monday. He is a co-owner of Wild Birds Unlimited in Novato, leads walks and seminars on nature in Marin, and blogs at Nature In Novato. You can reach him at jack@natureinnovato.com.
