By Dorothy Steinicke
This morning I saw a mourning dove picking up sticks outside our door. It must be nesting time. A few days ago I saw a puffed up male strutting around and circling a female in the backyard, carrying out the rites of courtship.
I hope they have found a new place for their nest. The old site has not worked well for them but that hasn’t seemed to stop them.
I remember our excitement the first time we saw them building a nest in the trellis over our patio. My daughters were young then, five and nine years old. We had been playing in the yard when one of them noticed a bird that kept coming back to the trellis with bits of twig in its beak. This was more interesting than whatever we had been doing. We stopped and watched the process for a long time. One dove stayed on the trellis. The other dove made deliveries of building material. When the carrier arrived he would pass whatever he had brought into the beak of the builder. She would poke it in here and there while the supply bird went off for more. After a while they both flew away.
I took this opportunity to lift each girl up to inspect the project. For all their hard labor it really didn’t look like much. It was fairly indistinguishable from the other plant debris that had collected on top of the trellis.
That evening I suggested that we make a ‘dove diary’, a little book where we would record the progress of our mourning dove couple. The girls drew pictures of the birds building their nest. I recorded the date and our observations of the building process.
The next day the birds were at it again. More twigs, leaves and pine needles carried to the corner of the trellis, more prodding about and rearranging. Again they left the project at the end of the day. Again I lifted the girls up so that they could make observations. We all had to agree that it really didn’t look very different. I just made a brief notation in the dove diary that work continued.
Nest building went on for several days. We continued to check and report that we really didn’t see much progress. Perhaps there was a bit of a soft lining now.
One day the birds were not working. Closer inspection revealed that there was no nest. It hadn’t been knocked to the ground. It simply wasn’t there. That was the end of the dove diary.
The next spring we saw mourning doves again hard at work, again in the same place. I was leery of starting another journal since the previous one had been a bust but we did keep an eye on them. This time they seemed to finish the nest and began sitting on it. We thought there must be eggs even though we couldn’t see them.
The trellis corner started to seem not such a bad location. When we had visitors we would point out the nest and sitting dove. They were never able to see it although it was clearly visible to us. It was as if our bond with the birds had given us some sort of magical vision. The sitting bird was absolutely still; we couldn’t even see it breathing. The dun color of the bird and the nest blended into the fallen leaves that were also sitting on the trellis. We looked up the incubation period of mourning dove eggs. Two weeks. We dug out the dove diary and began again to record observations. Again things didn’t seem to change much from day to day. Whenever we went to check we were met by the steady gaze of the dove parent-to-be. Once again, one day it was all gone. No nest, no doves, no sign of anything on or under the trellis.
This remained consistent through the years; courtship, nest building in exactly the same spot, sitting on eggs and gone. An odd thing is that it could not possibly have been the same dove couple through the years. They simply don’t live that long. Somehow the word was out that the corner of our trellis was a good place for a nest. Clearly the doves were not the only ones privy to that information. Our neighborhood has plenty of available predators: cats, squirrels, and crows, all of them aficionados of bird eggs.
We continued to watch their progress over the years but now we watched with hope rather than expectation. I always wondered why we never saw eggshells or the remains of the destroyed nest.
One year they actually hatched a chick. It was exciting to look into the nest and see the little damp, dark blob with beady eyes and a gaping mouth. That was one of their worst years as far as nest construction. The nest sat precariously over an opening in the trellis. As days passed it was starting to dip into the opening and tilt alarmingly. We decided to give it a little support. We passed some twine back and forth underneath to make a little hammock. This made the parent birds frantic. They both threw themselves on the ground at our feet. One was limping along dragging a wing in the dirt as if it were broken. They were begging us to prey on them and not their chick. We stepped away as quickly as possible.
In the end it didn’t matter. Within a few days it was all gone again, nest and chick. This time the parents did not abandon the area but stayed, cooing out their grief.
It isn’t as if there is any shortage of mourning doves, you hear their ghostly calls in the early morning wherever you are in Los Angeles. It’s just hard to see a pair trying to raise a chick year after year and never once fledging one.
We started the dove diary in hopes of helping our children appreciate the wonder and beauty of the natural world. I don’t think that is the lesson they learned. I’m afraid that they may have learned that that perseverance does not always lead to success, that the world is a dangerous place for the young and the vulnerable and that parents can’t always protect their offspring no matter how heroically they try. These things are all true. I suppose they are as much a part of the wonder and mystery of nature as are the beauty of a nest constructed entirely by a bird’s beak or the self-sacrificing devotion of bird parents.
As for this year’s pair, I think they have finally chosen another nest location. I see them picking up building materials but haven’t yet located where they are taking them. I wish them the best of luck.
Coda; A month after writing this piece I saw a fluffy mourning dove chick making experimental swoops from the fence to the ground. Success at last.