Love the Doves

Love the Doves Earl Plato
I normally get up early. We were living at the family farm in the 1980’s. It was in the gray light of dawn that I saw mourning doves alight in the pines. A few minutes later they fluttered down in twos to the cracked corn and bird feed we had scattered under and around our feeding table. In all, the most that we had seen at our table at any one time were only six. Readers of my articles let me know that they had much greater numbers at their feeding stations.
Think big. Read what this nature writer said about these fascinating birds.
“We scatter feed on the packed snow of the lane outside the entry door. They descend in threes and fours, then a dozen at a time, until the mass of grayish bodied fuse into a shifting, unstable carpet over several square yards of the ground.”
Get the picture? He continued, “As the light grew stronger I count the feeding birds. They are continually in motion making it difficult to determine the number. I count as swiftly as I can. ... my tally of doves shows more than 150 feeding in the yard this third day of January!” 150! Anyone top that count?
“ We scattered some more seed on the other side of the house around an old apple tree. While the larger doves were feeding, smaller doves found the food at the tree. About twelve ranged around the ring of seeds, their heads inward and their pointed tails projecting outwards.” What a photo shot, eh?
Watch a mourning dove when it lands. It immediately falls to snatching up food with rapid, piston-like up-and-down movements of his head. It’s an eating machine.
With winter only a few weeks old it’s not hard for me to predict a “real” winter. Real in the sense that there will be heavy drifting and thick icy sheets covering the ground. Doves are not strong birds. My observations are that they can’t scratch through the crusted snow. Break the crust and scatter the feed especially during poor weather conditions. Feed the doves!
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