The Game Who Has No Game or Mourning Doves and Their Search for Love

Following several years of ‘kills’ (primarily of an aviary quality) by my cat Uno, a former huntress, I became a birder. In an ability to look beyond the heap of guts lying on my living room floor as simply guts or prey, I bought a bird book and began listening, looking and studying the beings who sang/sing outside my window.

So far I have heard and observed the following birds:
Sparrows (Chipping, Field and the American House Sparrow, to be exact)
Robins
Starlings
Crows
Blackbirds
Cardinals –male & female (I also saw a female cardinal suicide-but that’s another story)
Mallards
Blue Jays
Finches (house and gold)
Hummingbird-ruby-throated
Downy Woodpecker
Red-billed Woodpecker
Warblers/Common Yellow-Throat
Common Snipe- a sandpiper
Hummingbird (in North Carolina)
Egret
Great Blue Heron (on their way warm)
Hawk
Chickadee
Pigeons
And ..
Mourning Doves (a smaller more delicate relative of the Pigeon)

These mourning doves, which are incidentally on the Michigan hunter hit list-probably due to the fact that they are birds of love and commitment- ‘hang’ in a tree adjacent to my house. There are three (2 males and a female) who hang around the same time every morning. The first time I watched I thought I was seeing a little bird nookie. but it was less nookie, and more posturing and posing. The mourning doves are obviously adolescent, awkward, persistent, clueless and fuzzy. Here is a typical scenario:

Boy Bird #1 and Girl Bird are on branch; Boy Bird#1 makes the move beak-on (beak might be first base in bird world), Girl bird flies to another branch, Bird boy #1 follows, tries again, Girl bird flies to another branch where Bird Boy #2 attempts a little play. Girl bird just trying to take it slow flies away in disgust (her chirp sounded disgusted). Bird Boy#1 and Bird Boy#2 sit side by side on a branch obviously contemplating their recent dis' and defeat.

This scenario reminded me slightly of a six grade love triangle in which Brian Lawrence, Steve Kriozere and perhaps Matt Cohn?, ( I don’t know .. but I do know they called him, “Puke”) were hoping to skate (as in roller skate) with me during the Couples Skate or Double Skate as it was innocuously known. The caller would call, ‘Backward Skate’ or Doubles or Trios”, and one would skate accordingly. I preferred the trio, which was two boys and a girl; the girl (c’est moi) being in the middle, holding hands with boys on either side. One could view this preference as a foreshadow toward certain sexual practices, or simply a brief foray as a ‘Skate Slut’.

As to the Mourning Doves, I sense she (Bird Girl) is less interested in a threesome, and more inclined to take it slow. Boy Bird#1, unlike my admirers, went in for the ‘kill’ (so to speak). He played the personal space rule, going beak-on rather than first sitting side-by-side (as he did so sweetly with his 'boy' friend). He flew too fast-taking one cue as the cue, and thus forcing flight. Her moving to another branch gave him a chance to regroup, to chill, but no.. he repeated the same beak-in-face-move, and she obviously disenchanted with his birdbrain, flew South (well, actually West), but you get the picture.

Why is the slow stuff, the sitting side by side, the hand-holding (the wing wiggling?) so much harder for some than the mashin’, the smashin’ and the going in for the kill’? What’s the game? Jumping branch to branch in hopes that one will follow in order to simply sit side by side? Love, whether you are being hunted or the hunter, is just hard to grasp. The rules are that there all no rules; all birds sing, but their songs are uniquely their own.

Love, even for those whom nature decides will have such, isn’t easy. Branches break. The elements, such as sun and wind and rain may threaten such synchronicity. Perhaps, somebody could be waiting in the wings. But more than likely, it just is time; waiting for the fuzz to develop into feathers, and flying without fear. On a wing and a prayer.