Birds
Mourning Dove
Zenaida macroura · also called turtle dove, rain dove
The mourning dove is everywhere in North America and easy to overlook: a slim grey-brown bird on a wire, on a lawn, at a feeder, giving a soft, sad coo that half the people who hear it think is an owl. It is also, remarkably, both one of the continent’s most abundant birds and its most heavily hunted.
Overview
Zenaida macroura lives across North and Central America in open country, farmland, and towns. It is soft grey-brown with black wing spots and a long pointed tail, and it eats almost nothing but seeds, storing thousands in its crop to digest later.
The coo and the whistle
The mournful cooing is made only by unmated males. The sharp twittering whistle on take-off comes from the outer wing feathers and works as an alarm signal that startles the rest of the flock into flight.
Hunted and abundant
Around 20 million are shot each year in the US — more than all other migratory game birds combined — and yet the population, near 350 million, stays stable, because a pair can raise up to six broods a year.
Crop milk
Both parents feed the young on a fatty crop secretion for the first days, a trait shared with flamingos and few others.
Status
Least Concern and stable, one of the most successful birds on the continent, though ground-feeding doves are prone to lead poisoning from swallowed shot.
Mourning Dove: common questions
Is that cooing sound a mourning dove or an owl?
If you hear it in daylight in a suburb or on farmland in North America, it is almost certainly a mourning dove. The male's advertising call, a soft, hollow, minor-key "coo-ah, coo, coo, coo", carries well and has a genuinely owl-like quality, and it is one of the most commonly misidentified bird sounds. Owls that make similar cooing sounds, such as the great horned owl, call mostly at night and have a deeper, more rhythmic hoot. The mourning dove also gives its call from an open perch such as a wire or a bare branch, often in the middle of the day, where an owl would not be sitting in the open.
How can the mourning dove survive being hunted so heavily?
By out-reproducing the losses. Mourning doves have a long breeding season, especially in the south, and a pair can raise several broods in a year, each time laying two eggs, incubating for two weeks, and fledging the young in another two weeks before starting again. That, combined with a wide, flexible diet of seeds and a tolerance of farmland and suburbs, produces a huge annual crop of young birds. Wildlife agencies set hunting seasons and bag limits based on population surveys, and the take, though it runs to tens of millions of birds, has not caused a lasting decline.
Why do a mourning dove's wings whistle?
The whistle comes from the shape and stiffness of the outermost primary feathers, which flutter and vibrate as air rushes past them during the fast wingbeats of take-off and landing. Research on related doves has shown that the sound functions as a signal — when a dove bursts into flight because it has been alarmed, the loud whistle warns nearby doves of danger, and other doves react to a recording of the alarmed whistle by fleeing. A dove leaving a perch calmly makes a quieter sound. So the whistle is a built-in, involuntary alarm that spreads through a flock.
What is the difference between a mourning dove and a rock pigeon?
They are in the same family but are easy to separate. The rock pigeon, the common city pigeon, is chunky and round-headed with a short tail, comes in a huge range of greys, whites, browns, and iridescent colours, and walks about in flocks on pavements and ledges. The mourning dove is slimmer and more delicate, soft grey-brown all over with black spots on the wing, a small head, and a long, pointed, white-edged tail, and it is a bird of open ground, wires, and gardens rather than city buildings. The mourning dove's call and whistling wings are also distinctive.