Mourning Dove

About the Mourning Dove

The Mourning Dove is the most abundant native bird in North America - several hundred million strong - and its soft, sorrowful cooing is stitched into the sound of every Texas town and farm. The bird itself is trim and long-tailed, soft gray-brown with black wing spots and a wash of pink iridescence on the neck.

Two sounds define it: that mournful "coo-OO-oo-oo" (made by males, and often mistaken for an owl) and the sharp whistling of the wings on takeoff - a sound produced by the flight feathers themselves that doubles as an alarm for every bird within earshot.

Mourning Doves are seed-eating machines, filling their crops with up to twenty percent of their body weight in seeds at a sitting, then retiring to digest. They drink by suction - rare among birds - and commute daily to water and grit. Breeding is nearly year-round in Texas: pairs raise brood after brood, up to six a year, on flimsy stick platforms, feeding the squabs on crop milk, a pigeon-family specialty.

They are year-round residents of every corner of the state, from city wires to desert tanks, and also North America's most important game bird, with Texas hunters taking a share of a continental harvest that the species' extraordinary productivity sustains. Few birds are at once so common, so economically significant, and so gently voiced.