Mourning Doves: The Meek Inherit & The Lost Are Found

When it comes to mourning doves, the world agrees with my usual instinct: the most essential thing to do is listen. There are appearances, there are the habits of one’s day, and there are the actions of one’s life, but few aspects of a bird or person make as indelible an impact as a voice. With different birds, different people may hear different things, form varying impressions. But in the case of the mourning dove, what almost everyone seems to hear is melancholy and yearning. 

Also invisible but invariably present at some indefinable distance are the mourning doves whose plaintive call suggests irresistibly a kind of seeking-out, the attempt by separated souls to restore a lost communion.

– Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire 1

This is their song, their central act of courtship. Since doves are technically outside of the passerine or “songbird” group, and since their songs are quite different from the high-pitched and often elaborate whistles of our most well-known singers, you will sometimes see this vocalization misleadingly referred to as a call, or technically as a “perch coo.” Cooing, of course, is not inherently a technical word, but a popular one, one that immediately conveys a whole host of connotations to a general public that is often indifferent to the voices of birds. Cooing suggests an affection that is supremely gentle, sometimes to the point of cloying forcelessness. Or, in the case of a cooing mourning dove, a longing that is unusually tinged with pathos. 

This is probably the most widely recognized bird sound on the continent, the one for which more humans could summon up the exact species name of the singer than for any other, given the bird’s evocative title. Not just a dove, as one might recognize a hoot as belonging to an owl, or a quack as belonging to a duck, but the cooing song of a mourning dove. It helps the learning process that this is a very uniform song, one that follows a reliable pattern: first a slurred phrase that rises to an expansive, higher, second syllable and then falls back into three separate, trailing off coos (occasionally only two, or four, but usually three):

coo-AAAHH coo… coo… coo…

At the end, listen for their next most familiar sound: the wing whistle

What is important to recognize is that the song, as well as loud, flapping display flights, are acts of courtship, behaviors primarily undertaken by unmated males to advertise themselves, either generally or in appeal to a particular female who has captured their focused attention. Once the pair bond is established these behaviors largely cease, with cooing becoming 80–90% less frequent . (There is, as usual, some more subtlety in the details: mated males occasionally pull out the perch coo for incidental duties, such as territorial warnings to intruder males or to summon the kids for feeding, and there may be some upswings in cooing between nesting cycles with the same mate.) Abbey and other poeticizers of birdsong who hear some form of lonely yearning in this cooing are not entirely wrong. 

Overall, our first impression of desolated solitude is in this case substantially closer to the mark than that other rich vein of human misinterpretation—that singing birds are “happy.” 

Do not waste any sympathy on this incessant love-maker that slowly sings coo-o-o, ah-coo-o-o-ooo-o-o-ooo-o-o, in a sweetly sad voice. Really he is no more melancholy than the plaintive pewee but, on the contrary, is so happy in his love that his devotion has passed into a proverb. 

– Neltje Blanchan, Birds Every Child Should Know, 1907

Blanchan is trying to be scientific, for her time. She is trying to tell us not to be misled by that superficial melancholy sound. But she is actually quite wrong. When monogamous bliss is established, the cooing largely ceases. This is a song that the lonely sing.