Amid spring’s profusion of birdsong, one of the most iconic voices is that of the mourning dove. It’s a familiar sound, in which an opening note swells into a higher second syllable, then falls back down into three trailing-off coos: “coo-AAAHH-coo … coo… coo.”
I love to hear and see these birds, in part for the unusually obvious affection of their springtime pairs — which I’ve written about before — and also their resonance as symbols of vulnerable innocence.
This association of doves with peace and gentleness has long cultural standing. You can find it going back thousands of years in classical and Biblical traditions as well as in in modern customs. From Noah sending a dove out of the ark and knowing that the flood was abating when he saw it returning with an olive leaf, to the universal sight of pigeons being fed in city parks, the same idea is at work: Doves are gentle creatures that we would like to protect, innocent victims that deserve succor.
This idea has remained prevalent for thousands of years in vastly different places because it is not a creation of a single human culture, but is intrinsic to the nature of the birds. Look at a mourning dove and you can see mildness at a glance. Their brown eyes are ringed in pale blue and set within a tiny head, giving them an impression of permanent wide-eyed innocence or naïve astonishment. The disproportion of their short legs and large body determines their characteristic mode of locomotion, an inefficient waddle that appears comically clumsy at speed.
The movements of mourning doves have two extremes; this trundling bipedalism and wild, careening flights that always appear faster than they can quite control. Aggression or even effectiveness seem antithetical to their character.
And yet mourning doves are one of the most abundant birds on the continent, with some population estimates in the range of 400 million individuals. How do you square the seeming weakness and vulnerability of these birds with their abundance and apparent evolutionary success? Two ways.
The first counterweight of frailty is flight. Mourning doves are exceptionally fast flyers and typically respond to threats with urgent acceleration (the whistling wings of a disappearing mourning dove are a diagnostic feature).
The second counterweight is fecundity. Dove mortality is very high and a one-year lifespan is typical, but they reproduce vigorously within that year, often raising three or more clutches of young in a single season.
Our stories of doves’ vulnerability are also influenced by the history of our species’ relationship in practice. Over the millennia, people have raised doves in captivity for food, religious sacrifice, ornamental ceremony and message bearing. Wild species have frequently been hunted, sometimes on vast market scale, and today on a less commercial but still considerable level — 10 million mourning doves a year in the United States.
The notable thing about these stories, though, is that they are stories, narratives with authors. Humans are both the enactors of the violence and the doves’ frequent sympathizers. Vulnerability invites both domination in practice and compassion in reflection. It’s the mourning dove that would elicit unapologetically sentimental defenses even within the writings of professional ornithologists, as when William Leon Dawson asked in the 1920s:
“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?”
These are the questions that doves and birds have always posed to people. When you encounter the meekest of creatures, how will you respond? Does vulnerability impel you to seize your advantage or does it awaken your sympathy? You can be feared, and take pleasure in your sense of power. Or you can spread a handful of seed and feel the warmth of nurtured trust.
Will you be the shelter or will you be the storm? Those blue-ringed eyes are wide with hope, and each dove bears a leaf of olive.
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.
