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Fast Facts
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During nest-building, the female stays at the nest and the male collects sticks. He stands on her back to give her the nest material. She takes it and weaves it into the nest. |
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The Mourning Dove almost invariably lays two eggs. Clutches of three or four are the result of more than one female laying in the nest. A dove may have up to five or six clutches in a single year. |
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A Mourning Dove pair rarely leaves its eggs unattended. The male usually incubates from midmorning until late afternoon, and the female sits the rest of the day and night. |
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The Mourning Dove is the most widespread and abundant game bird in North America. Despite being hunted throughout most of its range, it remains among the 10 most abundant birds in the United States. |
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The Eared Dove, Zenaida auriculata, is a New World tropical dove. It is a resident breeder throughout South America from Colombia to southern Argentina and Chile, and on the offshore islands from the Grenadines southwards. It appears to be partially migratory, but details are little known, although migration may be driven by food supplies.
Eared Doves provide the last big-bag shooting experience in the world. There are reckoned to be more than 23 million of these doves in the fields around Córdoba in northern Argentina and it is not unknown for a single gun to shoot 1000 birds in a day.
The scale of this wing-shooting recalls the numbers of Passenger Pigeons taken by North American gunners in the 1800s. That hunting pressure brought the Passenger Pigeon to rapid extinction, but the Eared dove seems to be more resilient. Indeed, as with the Passenger Pigeons, Eared Dove populations in Argentina and Bolivia sometimes "darken the skies". Thus, it seems that populations on the sporting estates of Argentina are holding their own, with the birds breeding four times a year and thriving on the vast areas of grain, some grown for their benefit, most of it on commercial farms which are happy to support the dove shooting.
The Eared DovEs around Córdoba do not migrate, and the enormous flocks are described as flying constantly between their roosting woods and the open fields.
Source: Wikipedia.com
MOURNING DOVE – BIRD INFORMATION
Abundant and widespread, the Mourning Dove is well known throughout most of North America. Its mournful call is heard from deserts to forest edges, from farmlands to inner cities.
Source: Cornell Lab of Ornithology
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