The Mourning Dove's soft, sorrowful cooing — often mistaken for an owl — is one of the most familiar sounds in Michigan, as is the sharp whistle of its wings on takeoff. Slender and small-headed in soft gray-brown with black wing spots and a long tapered tail, doves are equally at home on farm fences and suburban wires.
Mourning Doves are prolific: pairs can raise five or six broods in a season on famously flimsy stick nests, and both parents feed the young "crop milk," a nutrient secretion produced in the throat. They're year-round residents, crowding feeders in fluffed-up winter flocks.
Seeds almost exclusively — waste grain, weed seeds, and feeder millet and cracked corn, gathered on the ground and stored in the crop to digest later. A dove can pack away thousands of seeds in a single feeding session.
If you're hearing it in daytime, it's almost certainly a Mourning Dove. The mournful "coo-OO-oo-oo" is a courtship song, softer and sadder than any Michigan owl.
Air rushing through specialized flight feathers makes the whistle. It may serve as an alarm — a dove exploding off the ground alerts every bird in earshot.
A cheese-like secretion both dove parents produce in the crop to feed hatchlings — one of the few "milks" in the bird world, shared with pigeons and flamingos.
Yes, in any month. Numbers stay fairly steady from month to month. Winter is often the easiest time to find them, with bare branches, open sightlines, and snow cover concentrating birds at reliable food.
Juveniles are scaly-looking, with pale-edged feathers giving a fish-scale pattern, and they lack the adult's black neck spot and pinkish sheen. Squabs are fed 'crop milk' by both parents, unusual among songbird-sized birds.
A dule or a flight in old usage. In the field they form loose feeding flocks on bare ground and gravel roads, and the numbers build through fall as northern birds move south through Michigan.
Other birds you might be looking at instead.
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