Mourning dove

Name and taxonomy

The mourning dove belongs to the pigeon and dove family, Columbidae. Mark Catesby drew it in 1731 and called it the Turtle of Carolina. George Edwards drew live birds sent to England and named it the long-tailed dove. Carl Linnaeus then muddled this bird with the passenger pigeon in 1758. The confusion lasted until a ruling of 1955 fixed a name on each species.

Charles Lucien Bonaparte set up the genus Zenaida in 1838. He named it after his wife, Zenaide Bonaparte. The second half of the scientific name comes from Greek words meaning long tail. The word mourning in the English name points to the sad tone of the coo. Older books call the bird the Carolina pigeon, and some people say rain dove. Birders add the word American to separate it from an African dove with a similar name.

Evolution and relatives

The nearest relatives are the eared dove of South America and the Socorro dove. Some authorities treat the three birds as one superspecies. The Socorro dove was once counted as the same species as this one. Differences in voice, behaviour and plumage keep the two apart.

Bone shape once suggested the passenger pigeon was the closest living kin. Genetic work moved that place to the pigeons of the genus Patagioenas. Five subspecies are recognised, and they differ only slightly. Wing length, bill length and the depth of the grey shift from one to the next. Reports of crosses with the Eurasian collared dove appear rare and unimportant. The West Indian form holds Cuba, Hispaniola, Jamaica and Puerto Rico. One form lives only on Clarion Island off the Pacific coast of Mexico.

Appearance

An adult measures 22.5 to 36 centimetres long and weighs 96 to 170 grams. The wingspan runs 37 to 45 centimetres. The body is slender, the head small and round, and the tail long and tapered. The upper parts are light grey-brown and the underside is paler and pink. Black spots mark the folded wing, and the outer tail feathers are white.

A dark crescent of feathers sits just under the eye. Bare blue skin rings the dark eye, and the short legs are red. A male carries a bluish crown and pink-purple patches on the sides of the neck. A female is browner, a little smaller, and shows far less shine on the neck. Young birds look scaly and darker than their parents. A study in 2011 wetted the shiny neck feathers and watched the colour shift. The wet feathers changed hue and threw back almost 50 per cent more light. Thin layers of keratin, air and pigment inside each barbule make that shine.

Habitat and range

The range covers nearly 11 million square kilometres. Birds live all year across the continental United States and most of Mexico. The species also holds Bermuda, the Greater Antilles and southern Canada. Prairie birds in Canada are there only for the summer. Southern Central America sees the bird in winter alone.

It uses open and half-open ground: farmland, prairie, town gardens and wood edges. It keeps out of swamps and away from closed forest. Farming and suburbs have made more of the ground this dove likes. People brought the bird to Hawaii in 1963. Stray birds have reached the British Isles, Sweden, Iceland and the Azores. Records for the species come from 46 countries on GBIF. The bird reached Socorro Island in 1988, long after the local dove was lost there.

Diet and feeding

Seeds make up more than 99 per cent of what a mourning dove eats. The bird walks over bare ground and takes what lies in view. It does not dig or scratch, though it will nudge leaf litter aside. Snails and insects turn up in the diet only now and then.

A feeding bird fills its crop, then flies off to rest while the food goes down. It swallows grit and fine sand, which grind the seed inside the gizzard. Favoured foods include pine nuts, sweetgum, pokeberry, amaranth, corn and wheat. At garden feeders the bird takes rapeseed, millet, safflower and sunflower. When the best seeds run out it turns to rye, buckwheat and smartweed. It will also perch on a standing plant and strip seed from the head. Waste grain left after harvest gives the birds a large winter food store.

Behaviour and social life

Outside the breeding season the birds roost together in thick trees. A sleeping dove rests its head between the shoulders rather than under a wing. On cold days in Canada the flights to and from the roost start late. Doves sunbathe by lying down and holding one wing out for up to twenty minutes. They also bathe in shallow water, in rain and in dust.

Northern birds migrate the farthest, and some winter in Mexico or beyond. Birds that breed in the south move little or not at all. The spring passage north runs from March to May. The autumn passage south runs from September to November. Young birds leave first, then adult females, then adult males. Flocks travel by day and low, and a strong flier reaches 88 kilometres per hour. Some birds cross more than a thousand miles between the two ends of the year.

Communication and senses

The male's song is a drawn out coo that falls away at the end. People often take it for an owl on first hearing. The throat swells while the bird calls. Close by, a rattling note can be heard before the first coo.

A paired male has a shorter call that draws his mate to a nest site. There is a soft greeting note when the pair meet again. A short alarm note comes from either bird when something threatens. The wings whistle in flight, and the sound is loudest at take-off and landing. A bird can also clap its wings together as it leaves the ground. A chick taps the bill of a parent to make the adult bring up crop milk. Body displays serve to warn off a rival male or to draw a female in. No one has explained what the flight sounds mean to other doves.

Reproduction and life cycle

Mourning doves pair off and keep strong bonds, and some pairs hold through winter. A male begins with a noisy flight, then a wide circling glide on stiff wings. He lands, puffs out his breast, bobs his head and calls hard. Paired birds preen each other about the head and neck. The male shows the female several sites and she picks one.

The female builds the nest from twigs, conifer needles or grass. The male gathers the material and stands on her back to pass it forward. The finished platform is thin and loose. Pairs often take over an old nest of another bird or a squirrel. Most nests sit in trees, but a pair will use a ledge, a flower basket or bare ground.

A clutch is almost always two white eggs, about 2.57 to 2.96 centimetres long. The male sits from morning to afternoon and the female through the night. Incubation takes 14 to 15 days, and the nest is seldom left alone. Chicks hatch helpless and are fed crop milk for the first three or four days. Seeds are then mixed in, and the young fly at 11 to 15 days old. The father feeds them for up to two weeks more, and they can breed at 85 days. Young birds feed themselves at about 30 days old. The species holds the longest breeding season of any bird in North America. That season runs from February through October in the warmer states.

Predators and threats

Hawks and falcons are the main hunters of adult mourning doves. Crows, grackles, cats and rat snakes take eggs and small chicks. A parent will flap along the ground as if hurt to pull a hunter away. Fast, direct flight lets a dove escape most attacks it notices in time.

Brown-headed cowbirds rarely lay in a mourning dove nest. A cowbird chick cannot live on the seed diet the dove parents supply. The mouth parasite Trichomonas gallinae is the worst disease of the species. It grows in the throat and gullet until the bird can no longer feed. Avian pox, carried by insects, is also common. Each year up to 58 per cent of adults and 69 per cent of young die. Tapeworms, roundworms, mites and lice also live on and in the birds.

Population and conservation

The IUCN lists the mourning dove as Least Concern. The huge range and the huge population are the reasons. One count put the world total near 475 million birds in 1994. A more recent figure gives about 337 million in the United States. Watchers have logged 307,189 records of the species on iNaturalist. That count probably makes it one of the best watched birds on the continent.

Hunters take more than 20 million birds a year, and up to 70 million in some years. Managers set the seasons and the species carries the harvest. Numbers are still falling in the western United States. Habitat loss, lead poisoning and building work press on the birds everywhere. The long breeding season is probably the reason the total holds up.

Relationship with humans

The mourning dove is the leading game bird of North America. Shooting the bird accounts for over 1.9 million recreational trips each season. Some fields are sown with a favoured seed crop to draw birds in. The meat is eaten, and the bird is shot for sport as well.

Away from the guns the bird is a familiar garden visitor. It takes a wider range of seed at feeders than almost any other American bird. Pairs nest on window ledges, gutters and hanging pots. Gardeners see the bird clearing spilled seed from the ground under a feeder. Because it eats grain, it can be a small pest on farms. On balance the species probably gains far more from farmland than it costs.

In culture and myth

In Blackfoot tradition, dove feathers were carried as charms for a safe return from war. In eastern Algonquian belief, the call of a turtledove could announce a death. In Cherokee tradition the bird is tied to acorns, because the coo echoes their word for one. Abenaki and Pueblo communities have kept Dove clans. The Cherokee also keep a Pigeon Dance among their traditions. Several peoples in California treated the dove as a figure of foolishness.

In Aztec tradition the bird was a bird of Xochiquetzal, and it stood for love. In Mesopotamia the bird was sacred to Inanna and Ishtar. In the Hebrew flood story a dove brings back an olive branch. In Christian art a dove marks the Holy Spirit at the baptism scene. That long history is why a person who wants peace is called a dove.