18 October 07
Mourning Dove
Last night Yolo Audubon Society hosted a talk by the young and very energetic John (Jack) Muir Laws, author and artist (and designer and publicist and apparent distributor) of the Laws Field Guide to the Sierra Nevada.
Jack brought along a lot of the original plates for the book, whose main virtue is that it draws together just about anything you might see in the Sierra into one place which is easily back-packable. Of course I was very interested to see his bird drawings; how much more fun that I got to sit next to him at dinner beforehand and shyly show him my bird sketchbook after I told him about Bird by Bird.
He was quite opposed to the idea of using a video camera. Get out and draw the birds, he said, just get out there. We waxed enthusiastic about learning to see again, to find beauty in every bird (he’s particularly fond of female house sparrows). Ask birders what a rock pigeon’s tail looks like, he said. They don’t know, though they can rattle off the minute differences between a Hammond’s and a dusky flycatcher. Why? They don’t SEE it. It gets written off. Dismissed as irrelevant…
Not a rock pigeon, but a mourning dove, above, drawn this morning as it sat on a wire looking down on me. No camera. Just the bird, the pen, and me.
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Yes, so right. The beauty of the everyday. I loe that drawing too. Wikipedia tells me that it’s not the same as the African Mourning Dove although they are distantly related. I wonder if their calls are similar? It’s one of the most evocative sounds in the world for me (the African version).
rr, the mourning dove’s song can be heard here: http://www.naturesongs.com/mourndove1.wav
Thanks! They’re not the same, needless to say. And my google-foo isn’t working (or something) because I’ve been completely unable to find an audio file of the African version.
Ask Joe about rock doves, er, pigeons sometime. He’s started naming off their color/marking varieties when we walk into a flock in the city.
It’s interesting having this huge population of wild-living birds that descended from breeder stock and, I suppose, continually recruit from same. Particularly so when some breeds are known for weird aerial maneuvers like tumbling.
There’s that speculation that a pale or white rump patch has some predator-confusing effect too. And mother of god, can they fly! Comes of being peregrine chow on the cliffs back “home,” I guess.
how is rock pigeon related to a mourning dove