The Mourning Dove: Nature’s Moron
I am lucky and wise enough to live in an apartment that has two large windows overlooking a small, mildly wooded area. The trees and little stream (okay, it’s a semi-naturally-occurring drainage culvert) provide a nice aesthetic distraction from typing endlessly about 19th century theatre. And just in case the stationary nature isn’t sufficient to divert my mind from the development of opera parody in New York City as it relates to the Panic of 1837 (Woo Hoo! Party Tyme!), I have a bird feeder hanging outside of each window for additional amusement.
My mom made sure that there were a lot of bird feeders around our house when I was growing up. This provides a kid with a lot of close-up experiences with nature, and that can be pretty fascinating, especially when the nature is a ten-inch Pileated Woodpecker that is chowing down on the suet cake just on the other side of the glass window, and you’ve got to move very slowly to see how close you can get before he flies away. Parents, it’s this simple: wildlife is cool. Get your kid a bird feeder. So yes, I’m still living my childhood through bird feeders, but if you’re not still living your childhood in several different ways, there’s something wrong with you. I offer no apologies.
One of my feeders is the standard variety plastic tray deal that sticks to the outside of the window and has a handy roof so that the grub doesn’t get rained on. The grub is the normal mix of sunflower seeds (which all birds love) and those little beige seeds (which birds will eat, but not if there are any sunflower seeds around). The other one is a hanging bag of thistle with a little wooden roof over it. The plastic tray gets a lot of traffic and is by far the most entertaining of the two eateries. A wide variety of birds are constantly battling for a bite to eat, from brilliant red Cardinals and their under-dressed wives to nasty little gangs of Dirt-Brown Sparrows, who spend as much time trying to peck each other’s eyes out as they do actually eating birdseed. The thistle feeder caters strictly to Finches who, for some reason, eat thistle and nothing else. All other birds eat the mix and no thistle, and each group knows not to bother with the other group’s food, which apparently tastes like crap to them.
It is easy to apply human personality characteristics to some of these birds. The Dirt-Brown Sparrows are backstabbing bastards who spend as much time trying to peck out each other’s eyes as they do actually eating birdseed. The Cardinal is clearly arrogant, and always eats before his wife. The Finches are trembling neurotics, scattering in terror at the slightest movement of anything, including themselves. And then there is the Mourning Dove, Nature’s Moron. Very few birds could accurately be described as intelligent, but the Mourning Dove goes to extremes at the other end of the spectrum. Consider his appearance:
Clearly, this bird is an idiot. If the wide, empty eyes and expressionless look weren’t convincing enough, let me explain Mourning Dove’s eating habits. They can not, for the life of them, figure out where the bird seed is or how to eat it. God love them, they do try. Several of them will sit on the tree about twenty yards from the bird feeder, watching intently as countless customers come and go. If one of them had a little pad and pencil, I think he would be taking notes on what the other birds do:
1. Land on feeder.
2. Locate food.
3. Eat food.
4. Leave.
Since they don’t have any means of writing down this complex sequence, one of them eventually decides that he probably has it correctly memorized, and makes a run at the food. More often than not, the first attempt completely fails to make contact with the feeder. The dazed dove flaps wildly around the window, scaring the living bejeezus out of the other birds, and then lurches back to the branch where he asks his buddies what just happened. Clearly they have no idea, because they usually follow suit with similarly fruitless attempts. Eventually, one of them actually lands on the feeder, but nine times out of ten it comes to rest on feeder's roof rather than down below on the seed tray. There is no bird seed on the roof. There never is. At this point the baffled bird sits on the roof for upwards of three minutes, looking around and thinking, “Hey, I thought there was food around here. Everyone else was eating, where’s the food? Maybe it’s behind me. Nope. Maybe it’s behind me now. Nope. Maybe if I sit here long enough the food will come to me. I wonder what...uhhhhhhhh...” This extreme effort lulls the dove into a stupor from which it can be roused only by a particularly nasty group of Dirt-Brown Sparrows (or me banging on the window), at which point it launches itself haphazardly back towards the tree branch to report its adventures to its friends: “I have no idea what just happened. Did I eat anything?”
It baffles me that these birds weren’t weeded out of the food chain hundreds of years ago. How do they eat? If you can’t figure out how to consume food that is being served to you, how can you possibly manage to get naturally selected? The Mourning Doves are in serious need of a short bus to take them to remedial eating classes at the special-needs bird academy. I suppose that all animals have their roles to play, but I am unclear as to exactly how Nature’s Moron fits into the grand circle of life.
Yes, I have just written 950 words about the birds at my windows. There are two distinct possibilities here: Uno: I need very badly to get away from the dissertation and go do more interesting things with my life so that I can write about them. Dos: The world is absolutely filled to the brim with small moments of the hilarious and amazing, and if you’re not seeing them every single day, you’re just not paying attention. So go buy a bird feeder.
posted by Tyler @ 1:49 AM
5 comments
5 Comments:
woof woof.
In elementary school, I learned two things:
The first thing was the art crafting a homemade birdfeeder with a pinecone, peanut butter, yarn, and birdseed, guaranteed to lure birds in from all over the neighborhood, which I could then observe through my new binoculars. I took pride in many a seed-and-peanut butter-covered pinecone in my youth, awaiting the time when my birdfeeder would become so successful that CROWDS would gather around my backyard to see the seven year-old wunderkind and her aviary paradise.
The second thing I learned in elementary school was that birds will never, EVER feed on a gooey, sticky pinecone, matter how starving and destitute they are. My childhood was wasted.
The mourning dove is the Paris Hilton of the bird world. Clearly the bird is beautiful in it’s own right and quite the envy of the bird sociables about town. Mourning doves are actually well known for creating fashion fads such as cropped tail feathers and fantastic make up. You’ll notice the “teardrop” under the eye, which obviously gave the dove its current name. They used to be known as the Geronimo dove, for their tendency to wear parachute pants. (According to your region you may have also heard them referred to as Hammer Doves)
As far as the dove’s inability to eat, she actually thinks that it’s cool not to eat. She will just sit there atop the house and play with her food without so much as touching it. The pivoting back and forth is simply the dove showing off her latest trends. They may be subtle trends, which would explain the multiple movements. She can’t sit still and let only half of her audience see whatever new trend she is sporting. She has to pivot and move as though she was on the catwalk, which by the way is not a very well received word in bird land.
The doves on the branch will watch the other birds with disgust and mock them for actually having to eat. You may ask, “Why the dove is so large if it does not eat?” The answer is simple and elegant. The feathers they’re wearing are not their own, but a feather coat made out of the feathers of other birds and imported from Sri’ Lanka.
So really the mourning dove may have a few less brain cells than the birds around her. But who needs brains when you’ve got money. All birds should look up to and appreciate the dove. She is so brave for taking the risks of starting her own line of baths and ten thousand count nesting material. She is a hero. We should strive to be just like her.
After reading your commentary on doves I had to respond. Doves are ground feeders, therefore, it is difficult for them to eat from a bird feeder. Doves are soft-billed birds, meaning they must swallow whole seeds. They do not have the means necessary to crack open sunflower seeds and other tough seeds that birds such as cardinals can enjoy directly from a birdfeeder.
Doves perch nearby a bird feeder and watch while the other birds toss seeds to the ground, then they'll feed from the small seeds that are discarded from above. Since you have seen doves try to feed directly from the feeder, they are probably trying to get some seed to spill onto the ground so they can pick out the seeds that they prefer.
Because doves swallow their seeds whole, they "crush" the seeds in the digestive system by also swallowing small bits of rock or sand referred to as "grit".
Hopefully with this information you won't view doves as "morons", but rather as peaceful, adaptive birds that are a joy to behold.
We always have tons of mourning doves at our feeder during the winter, and they always do what Chelle said: they toss as much seed as possible to the ground. We never understood and called them dumb, but now it makes sense. There is a type of finch who also tosses it to the ground, and the doves fly over to get it. Our bird feeder is shaped like a birdhouse, and placed on top of a platform feeder. (We made our own feeder) The doves will fly and land on the brim of the triangle roof and then slip down it into the food in the feeder. It is rather amusing to watch them. I love the mourning dove, even if it is a Paris Hilton or moron.
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