On the Wings of a Dove

Reprinted from March 2019

By Sara Wright

We are approaching the spring equinox, historically one of my favorite times of year. The wheel is turning as the sun’s light grows more brilliant and the sunrise occurs further to the northeast. The night sky is sparkling with cracked stars. Venus shines low in the east… The other notable change is that, here anyway, a pair of White - winged doves are starting to sing at dawn. I can also hear other dove songs in the distance. When the couple retires to the Russian olive after feasting on cracked corn, Lily b, my African (European) Collared dove peers out at them. The melodious “who who who hoooh” sound or one of its variations (depending on the species) is music to our ears.
 
My love affair with doves began when I was a child. I used to draw and paint stylized white doves on scraps of paper after watching them flutter to the ground to feed outside my grandmother’s window. As an adult I often had a hundred (Mourning) doves feeding on seed that I scattered outside my back door. At a Jungian conference in Assisi, Italy in the 80’s I was serenaded from dawn to dusk by thousands of doves and pigeons including pure white doves.
 
When my father died suddenly, soon after one of these trips, a white dove appeared with the Mourning doves and stayed around for exactly one day before disappearing as mysteriously as s/he came. That same night my father’s brother, my uncle, bit into a tiny stone dove that was hidden in his pasta; that white dove - stone remains on his son’s mantelpiece to this day. I didn’t know until recently that the white dove is a Ring neck dove mutation.
 
The spring after my father’s death I acquired a dove of my own, an African collared dove who is closely related to the European Collared/Ring neck and White winged doves who live around here. Lily b has been a free flying house bird for 28 years. He has traveled back and forth across country a few times in the back of the car always without a cage. He has also made a number of excursions into the wild but he always returns by his own volition. He has also survived three mates, two of which lived a normal life span of 8-10 years like our wild doves do here…
 
Like me, Lily b does a lot of bird watching. He spends most mornings these days perched on a basket or windowsill peering out at the White winged doves. The White winged doves do not favor Lily’s company as he discovered while flying around outdoors one morning early last summer. He had been enjoying a sun bath on the open porch before making a brief foray into the trees. Undaunted, Lily continues to converse with his avian relatives with great enthusiasm. Lily b is a very democratic bird!
 
White winged Doves live in dense, thorny forests, streamside woodlands, deserts full of cactus and, more recently, urban and suburban areas of the southern U.S. They tend to breed in the interiors of forests rather than near the edges. White-winged doves now breed as far north as Oklahoma so the species is moving northward and the breeding range extends south to Panama and east to Cuba. Wherever they range White winged doves prefer places where nesting habitat is interspersed with feeding habitat, like grain fields or desert cactus communities. In the winter, White-winged doves are found throughout most of their breeding range as well as in the southeastern United States, and some individuals wander widely across the continent.

The White-Winged dove eats mostly grains and other agricultural crops like wheat, sunflower, milo, corn, and safflower. They also eat fruits and large seeds and seem predisposed toward large seeds perhaps because of their large bills.
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 In some desert areas this dove often feeds on the fruits of cactus, and visits their flowers for nectar. White winged doves are important pollinators of the giant saguaro cactus, a fact that fascinates me because I don’t think of doves as pollinators. They also commonly feed above ground level on berries and raised bird feeders although they won’t feed on my porch; I have to throw corn over the railing. Like many birds, these doves consume small stones and sand to help with digestion. They also eat snails as a protein source and bone fragments for calcium.

Males choose the nesting territory while the females select the specific nest site, preferring a protected tree branch located in the shade. They gravitate towards woodlands, particularly along streams. Around here during the summer they prefer the Cottonwoods.

The male gathers twigs and brings them to the female, who constructs the nest over a couple of days. Made mostly of sticks, the nest also may have weeds, grasses or mosses arranged in a flimsy bowl about 4 inches across. Doves in general are very casual nest builders and nests rarely survive one season. Although the rule is that two white eggs are laid and gestated for about three weeks these doves may have a couple of broods a year.

White winged Doves walk along tree branches and on the ground; they fly in a swift and straight path. Courting and nesting males will occasionally strike bills and slap wings with each other, but they mostly defend their perches and nests by using an aggressive call or flailing their wings and tail. Males perform courtship flights, spiraling up into the sky and then back to the branch they started from in a stiff-winged glide. They also bow, puff up their necks, or fan their tails to entice females to mate; White winged Doves are monogamous. When a predator comes to call they may feign a broken wing to lead the intruder away.

By far the most dangerous predator to these doves is man and in this part of the Southwest White winged doves were hunted almost to extinction. Today their overall populations are still declining because of habitat loss.

I was surprised to read that most of those nesting in the Southwest move south in fall because we seem to have a stable, though modest year round population, perhaps because we feed our birds or, more likely, because of Climate Change. Migration, when it occurs, is early in both seasons, most birds arriving by March and leaving in September.

Each year I am on alert for the first coos from the local population of doves because for me they usher one of nature’s certainties, namely that spring is on the way even if snow or silver frost covers the grasses in the field. The flutter of dove wings and melodious cooing creates a symphony I wouldn’t want to live without. Lily b and I find a deep pleasure in each moment that these birds grace our yard.