7 o’clock (AM or PM) like Sunday when there was school on Monday has a melancholy association for me. That’s because our kitchen clock has long been one of those Audubon clocks with bird songs heralding each hour. The 7 o’clock bird is the mourning dove whose very name arises from the feelings its song inspires. Fortunately, the gloom is short-lived because 8 o’clock brings the more chipper chickadee and the cardinal sings at 9. But real mourning doves in the wild cause me no such grief - I find their song calming, peaceful, reassuring, and evocative of childhood memories.
Speaking of songs, doves (the turtle variety in Europe and the mourning variety in North America) have inspired hundreds of songs and poems and appear 60 times in 22 of Shakespeare’s plays. (Compare that to the starling, who appears only once.) Judy Collins sang a lovely antiwar ballad called The Dove in 1963, and the Roche Sisters a quite different one, A Dove, in 2010.* Most such musical and literary references associate doves with love and with peace - great companions to have in the backyard!
Mourning doves are found throughout the United States, southern Canada, and Mexico. Some migrate thousands of miles while others migrate only a few hundred miles or don’t migrate at all. We are grateful for those hardy ones who bring peace and love to our yard throughout the winter. With a population of 350 million, mourning doves are one of the most abundant of North American birds. They are also by far the most popular game bird with hunters harvesting over 20 million each year.
Predominately seed eaters, mourning doves can store thousands of seeds in their crop, an appendage of their esophagus, for later digestion. And they can produce “crop milk” as a creamy nutrient rich food for their nestlings. The crop is also known as the craw - the source of the expression “sticks in my craw” when you have been confronted with something, perhaps in a White House briefing, that you just can’t swallow. My craw has been pretty full in recent years.
Another dove song from Mark in the comments below - La Paloma