A Mourning Dove Solstice

Something very unusual happened today at the feeder. I had up to 12 Mourning Doves at one time flocking to my hopper feeder and on the ground underneath. I have never had so many doves in my backyard - let alone such a large grouping in December. Are the doves forecasting a mild winter? We are about to head into a week-long thaw for Christmas.

Or maybe this will become a new trend with more doves spending winters in Minnesota. For over thirty years, I have been monitoring my backyard feeder birds through the Cornell Lab program called Project FeederWatch. About every two weeks from November through April, I count the highest number of birds of each species seen at the feeders in a two-day span.

Mourning Dove backyard observations each winter from November to April.

Now all the past data I have recorded has been digitalized so I can easily pull up the history of my Mourning Dove observations since 1990. My backyard has had between one to four doves seen at a time over the winter with many seasons having zero sightings. Today was an official FeederWatch count day so that will be recorded in this season’s data. Certainly this could be an aberration which is why having the long-term data will shed more light on whether this will become a trend.

Fortunately the Mourning Dove population is very stable with an estimated breeding population of 150 million. An interesting point regarding a possible threat to them, as well as other birds, is the use of lead shot. According to All About Birds:

Mourning Doves are the continent's most popular game bird: hunters may shoot more than 20 million each year. Because of the birds' popularity, game managers monitor their numbers to set hunting limits. Although Mourning Doves seem to tolerate hunting pressure, they also face the less visible problem of lead poisoning. Mourning Doves forage on the ground, and in heavily hunted areas they eat fallen lead shot (records show some doves have eaten up to 43 pellets). Studies have found this problem is especially bad around fields planted to attract the doves, where 1 in 20 doves wind up eating lead.