General Information

• Mourning Doves produce a mournful cooing sound which is probably responsible for its memorable common name.

• Like all birds, Mourning Doves are unable to sweat, so to stay cool during hot weather they pant just like a dog. Panting requires the doves to drink a great deal of water due the excessive loss of moisture to evaporation

      o Doves are one of the few species of birds that drink by sucking up their water instead of taking a bill full of water and letting it trickle down their throat. It can suck up its total daily requirement in less than 20 seconds.

• It is incredibly easy for Mourning Doves to lose their feathers outside of molting periods. This is beneficial for the birds in the event of a predator attack. If the predator is only gripping the feathers, then those feathers can easily be pulled free from the skin of the dove allowing it to escape without injury.

• The average life span for an adult Mourning Dove is 1 ½ years. The oldest known free-living bird, discovered through bird banding research, was over 31 years old. This is the record life span for a North American bird that lives on land.

• Mourning Doves’ have been clocked at flying speeds between 40-55 mph.

• Male and female Mourning Doves look very similar, but the male is slightly larger and has a more colorful bluish crown on its head and a pink colored chest.

Feeding Behavior

• The Mourning Dove’s large crop enables it to feed on a large quantity of seeds in a short amount of time, thus limiting the amount of time it is vulnerable to predators.

• Mourning Doves are primarily ground feeders and enjoy a selection of seeds such as millet and safflower at your backyard feeders. Due to their flexible beak they can’t crack safflower seed, but they will eat a safflower seed shell and all.

• Both parents feed their young on “crop milk,” a yogurt-like secretion produced by the walls of their crop. It takes both parents to provide enough food for the growing nestlings. If one parent is lost during the nestlings’ first seven days, the young will not be able to survive on the food produced by the lone remaining adult.

• The Mourning Doves’ diet is almost strictly seeds (99%) which they forage from the ground, preferring bare ground to areas of tall vegetation or thick cover.

       o The crop of one Mourning Dove was found to contain over 17,000 individual annual bluegrass seeds.

Nesting Behavior

• Mourning Doves are known to be monogamous for an entire breeding season, and there is some evidence that they may re-pair in succeeding breeding seasons.

• Mourning Doves’ nests are woven together by the female with materials collected by the male. The male supervises the construction while standing on the back of the female as she works.

       o Look for the female Mourning Dove incubating her eggs from late afternoon until midmorning, and then watch for the male to come and take his turn during the heat of the day.

• Mourning Doves may have up to six clutches per year with a typical clutch size of two eggs. This prolific number of nesting cycles is the largest of any North American bird. It is estimated that 500 million of these doves inhabit the continent each autumn, making it one of the 10 most abundant birds in the United States.