Mating for life – Mourning Doves
I have completely given up on the idea of figuring out what I did on previous square posts months — maybe I should take that memory medicine they advertise on TV? Prevagen? Would it help?
There’s nothing more connected than a pair of doves. They sit together on a branch, always touching. They share the feeder. They clean each others’ feathers. They are not our brightest birds, but they are very sweet.
Anyway, this is about mourning doves. Some of the food we put out happens to be the favorite of doves — and none of the other birds like it at all — so we have doves. We’d have more if we had bigger feeders. You just can’t fit more than 3 doves into that flat feeder. You can try, but it tilts. Doves are pretty big.
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Categories: Birds, Gallery, Photography
Serendipity Seeking Intelligent Life on Earth 
One dove of a couple got killed in our garden in France by one of the many cats who regarded our land as theirs. For 3-4 MONTHS the widowed partner cried in anguish and desperation; I couldn’t hear it any longer! They are silly, dumb but oh so faithful to each other.
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What magnificent photos of those beautiful birds! I find it so heart warming to think of them, together through whatever life brings. I know they don’t ‘feel’ it like humans do, it’s a natural instinct; but for me? It reminds me that some creatures can ‘love’ each other unconditionally. I’ve heard eagles and swans are the same, they mate for life. And wolves. Such wonderful creatures all!
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They aren’t the smartest birds in the bunch, but they are sweet and other than sheer bulk, there’s nothing much they can do to other birds except take up space. I think they are affectionate, lovely, and peaceful.
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How lovely they are.
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They are less afraid of me than they used to be, so they don’t fly away the moment they see me. You can tell they are watching me as I take pictures of them. They’ve never done this before, so I must be making progress 😀
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We have a dove who comes here sometimes but the slightest sound makes it fly away.
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oh these are such gorgeous photos of them, specially the first few. Wonderful Squares Marilyn, what does it matter if none of us can remember earlier squares – we can all just coo at these doves!
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Those front-facing shots were really difficult to process. The way the sun hit them, they were very washed out, so it took a lot of processing to get the color back. I spent an inordinate amount of time trying to get the RIGHT colors, too. Birds always have lots of colors mixed together and if your color is a little off target, you get some really interesting looking birds. They were coming out rather aqua where they should not be aqua except for the rings around their eyes which actually IS aqua. In the end, they came out pretty well. It was also a little too dark for that particular lens (but it’s the best long lens available for this camera — very long lenses are slow), so the originals were REALLY noisy. I couldn’t do anything with them until I got the noise reduced. THEN they started to look like birds 😀
I like them because they are the least aggressive bird of all the birds I’ve seen. Sometimes they push smaller birds out of the way, but they don’t have an aggressive feather on their bodies. I think that must be why they are an international symbol of peace. They truly are peaceful.
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you are amazing all the post processing you are doing.
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