My new house has a bird feeder in the back yard, so one of my first thoughts on moving in was, hey, wouldn’t it be great to have a birdfeeder out the back window, so I could see all the new and exciting birds in this new neighborhood.
So I bought some seed and poured out about a buck-fifty worth of it, and two hours later I look out the back window and I see neither new birds nor exciting birds, but I do see quite a lot of birds.
It does not look like the bird feeder will be anything other than a mourning dove feeder.
my parents are really into feeding birds, but they have some elaborate hierarchy by which they rank how worthy different types of birds are to eat the food they put out. some birds they’ll ooh and aah, and some they’ll bang the window to try and scare away. “i can’t believe those #$(*&@# s are eating the suet again!”
i dont know where morning doves are on their list.
I used to really like mourning doves. But that was back in Wisconsin where they are relatively rare. Here in Austin I’ve sat on a back porch and been unable to hear the sound of traffic over the coo-ing of the doves.
These days I’m all about the Inca doves. They’re smaller, almost always travel in pairs, they have lovely rubble-pattern feathers, and you hardly ever see them. They also look a lot less like pigeons.
looking back on this post with new eyes, I have to admit that these are not actually mourning doves, but are white-winged doves, which are slightly larger and only common in the American Southwest.