Media Coverage - Hunting Season Would Hurt Mourning Doves
Published September 24, 2006.By Emma Bickham Pitcher, Kalamazoo Nature Center. Kalamazoo Gazette.
Mourning doves are permanent residents in Michigan. Groups of six or eight doves tiptoeing around, scavenging under feeders, are familiar sights.
These gentle birds are counted among the 10 most common birds in the Lower Peninsula, where in the last census mourning doves were found breeding in every county. They roam in yards, farms and hedgerows and in parks where evergreens, spruces especially, provide nest sites. Nests are sometimes placed casually on rocks or rail fences.
Mourning doves are gray-brown or fawn in coloring with a subtle bluish overcast. Long, very pointed tails are banded in black with conspicuous white-feather tips. Occasionally one finds bits of green and gold iridescence on male doves. Their small, slender black bills have fleshy coverings. The female is smaller and duller than is the male. Weight varies from 4 to 6 ounces.
Lifestyle
The long tail supports a powerful direct flight. Wings make a whistling sound, noticeably on takeoff, and flight speed has been measured at 30 to 36 mph. Strength of dove flight is attested to by statistics from an April 16, l960, heavy windstorm that left 3,956 dead birds of many species on 11 miles of Indiana beaches. Of this number, only 17 were mourning doves.
Numbers here increase in February, when flocks migrate north and the familiar hollow, low-pitched ``Oo-ah! cooo-cooo-cooo'' sound becomes common. This persistent, plaintive call is source of the common name.
Dove couples pair off quickly and get down to the all-important task of reproduction. Studies of banded birds indicate that they mate for life. The male perches in a high spot and ``mourns'' all day, defending his territory by flying out at anyone approaching.
The nest is only a few crossed sticks without rim or lining. The father incubates the eggs in daytime, and the mother does so at night for about two weeks. After hatching, parents brood squabs for two weeks while feeding them by regurgitation.
``Pigeon milk'' is a thick, cheeselike substance produced in both parents' crops during the nesting season. After the first few days, small grains the parents have softened in their throats are fed. And, oddly, the doves feed their young snails to provide calcium. One wonders how they learned to do that! Parents continue feeding young a few days after fledging.
The dove calendar
In the South, five nestings a year occur. Locally, three are common. Active nests with young are found as late as mid-September. Soon adults give up life as a couple and become gregarious, joining others along power lines and in communal roosts at night as populations prepare to shift south. Large flocks migrate, some as far south as Panama, flying by day.
In the wild, doves live as long as five years, more commonly two or three.
Unlike most birds, mourning doves drink with their heads in normal position, as humans do, instead of raising their heads to let the water trickle down their throats.
Doves take dust baths in gravel roads or sand pits to get rid of parasites. They gather bits of grit to help grind seeds in their gizzards.
Threat from hunting
In Southern states where mourning doves have five broods a year, they are the traditional game bird. In parts of Canada and many northern states, the mourning dove is completely protected by law.
In ``Breeding Birds of Michigan,'' Larry Caldwell wrote, ``It is presumed that late nesting doves remain to become the wintering population....Thus if the species were hunted here...we would probably lose a large segment of the wintering flock. A dove-hunting season set for earlier than mid-October would orphan young.''
Michigan laws have protected doves since 1905, but a recent change permits a short season in a limited number of counties. Hunters, wanting to ease the restrictions further, are pushing to lengthen the season and increase the number of counties involved, thus seriously threatening the well-being of dove populations.
One of the negative results of hunting is the increase in lead shot that hunting inevitably deposits in the environment. We worry about lead in gasoline and lead in old paint, and now we need to restrict its increase in land all around us. Dedicated dove lovers are trying hard to reestablish full protection at all seasons.
Doves' feeding preferences are concentrated on seeds, especially grass and weed. In one dove stomach 7,500 seeds of yellow wood sorrel, or sour grass, were found.
