Dear Bird Folks, I have heard that Mourning Doves mate for life. Is that true? If it is true, what will happen to the mate of the dove that a hawk caught in my yard last weekend?
Sharyl W.
Yeah sure, Sharyl
Mourning Doves mate for life, but that is no big brag for a species that has a life expectancy of about two weeks. Well, maybe they live more than two weeks, but not much more...just ask that dove that the hawk snagged.
Nearly 80 percent of all new doves don't make it to their first birthday. And half of those few that make, it never see year two. So if you do the math, for every 100 doves only 10 will be around to mate twice. Besides having a huge number of natural predators, doves are the most hunted creature in the country. Each year close to 42 million doves are killed by hunters, mostly in Texas. In Massachusetts, Mourning Doves are protected songbirds, but in Texas they are considered game birds and are shot at, along with other cute creatures like prairie dogs and Democrats.
For this reason, doves spend little time weeping over a lost mate. There is a brief service and then it's business as usual. If a dove is lucky enough to live a long time, it could end up having quite a few mates. Maybe not as many as Lis Taylor, but still it would have a lot. *
The Bird Folks
P.S. from You might also want to check out an interesting narrative on a balcony nest (with pics) here.
Another site -- awesome pics. DD
5 comments:
Hm..... hope my couple and it's kid do better then this sad fact of Mourning bird fact.......
Spaz, I certainly hope so too. Doves are sweet, innocent creatures. I'm still upset with my cat, Bixby, for killing one last Saturday, even though I've been told he was trying to impress me.
I used to have a cat entry into the garage and through the door into the house. It is gone now. I became too flustered at my cats' adoration. Live birds and crawly mammals and reptiles sacrificed in my presence. I was asleep, but I could CSI the situations when I awoke. I yelled at my poor loving cat about it once, and a few minutes later the bird was gone ???????? . . . Inside my pretty pink dress shoe, the creature had been entombed. The clincher was the Sunday morning when my cats and a friend of theirs were playing soccer on the kitchen floor with a vole. I hoped it would resolve itself by the time I got home from church. It did. btw - I sent the friend home. Bixby was giving you a gift.
Yeah . . . thanks a lot......
CSI, indeed!!! Bixby went through a stage of bringing mice/rats up in through a (broken) basement window, trapping them in the 1/4 bath downstairs.
It sometimes looked like he had been using them as...sorry...paintbrushes. Lot's of red paint.
BTW, was about to plant that 'dove' planter for the summer, but it seems that once more they have taken possession of it. And to my very big surprise, there are two more eggs in the nest!
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