Mourning Dove

A Mourning Dove is a slender, medium-sized dove, 9.1 to 13.4 inches (23-34 cm) long and 3 to 6 ounces (86-170 g),¹ smaller and slimmer than a city pigeon. It has a small, round head, short legs, a thin dark bill and a long, tapering tail.

From a distance it looks plain soft brown. Closer, it is grayish brown to buffy tan above and peach-colored below, with a scatter of black spots on the folded wing and a small black mark below and behind the eye. The eye is dark, set in a ring of bare bluish skin (greener in females), and the legs are pinkish red. In flight the long, pointed tail opens into a fan with black bars and white tips on the outer feathers, and the wings make a whistling sound as the bird takes off.²

That tail is the giveaway. All About Birds calls the long, pointed tail unique among North American doves.

Males and females look much alike. A male is a little brighter, with a bluish-gray crown and nape, a rosy breast and pink iridescence on the side of the neck; a female is browner on the head, tan on the breast, and her neck gloss is usually greenish. The difference is subtle, and Birds of the World warns that sexing doves on plumage alone can easily go wrong.² Males also look drabber in fall, when new feathers have olive tips that wear off by spring.

Young doves are easier. A juvenile has pale buff or whitish edges to the feathers of its breast, back and wings, which give it a scaly look, white marks on the face, and no black spot below the eye. Scaly young are sometimes taken for an Inca Dove or a Common Ground Dove.³ They look like adults after a molt that starts at about a month old and takes three to four months. More on the young: baby Mourning Doves. How to tell the sexes apart, and how often plumage misleads: male vs female Mourning Doves.

Eurasian Collared-Dove. The introduced dove, now found across much of the US, is paler and heavier, with a black half-collar on the back of its neck and a blunt, square-ended tail. Mourning Doves have no collar and a pointed tail.⁴ Side by side: Collared-Dove or Mourning Dove?

White-winged Dove. A bulkier dove of the South and Southwest, spreading north, with a shorter, rounded tail and big white wing patches that show best in flight.⁵

Rock Pigeon. The city pigeon is bigger and stockier with a shorter, square tail, and the wild type is pale gray with two black bars across the wing.

Inca Dove and Common Ground Dove. Audubon's guide notes that scaly young Mourning Doves are sometimes taken for these small doves.

The song is the sound that gave the bird its name: a low, mournful two-part coo followed by two or three louder coos, written "coo-oo, OO, OO, OO". It is called the perch coo, and it comes mostly from unmated males in the breeding season, often from a wire or treetop, seemingly to attract a mate. Females sometimes give a faint version. Cooing builds through spring, peaks from mid-May to mid-June in much of the range, and is most frequent from about half an hour before sunrise to an hour and a half after.²

A paired male has a shorter nest call, three distinct notes, low-high-low, which he uses to call his mate to a possible nest site. Mourning Doves also have a soft greeting "ork" and an alarm call. Not every sound is a voice: the wings whistle in flight, loudest at take-off and landing, and a displaying male claps his wings as he leaves his perch.

Hear the song and the wing whistle, see the song drawn as a spectrogram, and tell the coo from an owl: Mourning Dove sounds. Their song is easy to compare with the Collared-Dove's three-note coo: Collared-Dove call.

Mourning Doves breed across southern Canada, in every one of the lower 48 states, into Mexico, and locally in Central America and the Caribbean. They were introduced to Hawaii in the 1960s, and small populations now live on several of the islands.

They are birds of open country of almost every kind: farmland and grassland, open woodland and its edges, roadsides, towns, suburbs and backyards. They avoid only extensive forest and wetlands, and they have no aversion to nesting close to people. In much of the US you can see them in any month.

Look along telephone wires and fences, and on patches of bare ground where doves gather to pick up seeds and grit. Listen at dawn in spring for the slow coo, and for the whistle of wings when a dove takes off.

Some do. Mourning Doves are partial migrants: most breeders on the northern edge of the range fly south for the winter, birds at middle latitudes partly so, and southern birds mostly stay put. In winter they are found through most of the breeding range except central Canada and the north-central US, and south through Mexico and Central America. Young birds tend to set off first, in late summer, and most migration is done by day, in flocks.² More: Mourning Dove migration.

Seeds, almost nothing else: about 99% of the diet. Where farmers grow them, doves take waste grain and crop seeds such as corn, wheat, sorghum, millet and sunflower; elsewhere, seeds of weedy plants of open ground, from foxtail grasses and crotons to ragweed and pigweed. Animal food is incidental, mainly snails, and they swallow grit, which may also supply calcium.

They feed almost entirely on the ground, in the open, without scratching, and eat fast: a dove fills its crop, a pouch in the throat, then flies off to digest at a safe perch. The record from one crop is 17,200 bluegrass seeds. A dove eats about 16% of its body weight a day, and it drinks by suction, without lifting its head to swallow.² More: what Mourning Doves eat.

All About Birds suggests putting out seed, especially millet, either on the ground or on a platform feeder. Project FeederWatch also lists cracked corn, black-oil and hulled sunflower, safflower, milo, nyjer, oats and peanut hearts, at ground, large hopper and platform feeders.⁶ Keep cats indoors: birds that feed on the ground are especially at risk.

Keep feeders and baths clean. Doves and pigeons can catch trichomonosis, caused by a parasite, which brings cheesy growths in the mouth and throat, and it spreads through shared food and water. The Pennsylvania Game Commission advises changing food and water daily, discouraging large crowds at feeders and baths, and disinfecting them with one part bleach to nine parts water.⁷

Mourning Doves nest in trees, shrubs and vines, on buildings and in gutters and hanging flower pots, and readily on the ground where trees are scarce. The male brings twigs and passes each one down to his mate from a perch on her back, and she arranges them into a flimsy platform about 8 inches (20 cm) across, sometimes on top of an old nest.

The clutch is normally two white eggs. Both parents incubate for 14 days, the male from mid-morning to late afternoon and the female the rest of the day and night, and both feed the chicks crop milk, a rich secretion from the lining of the crop. The young leave the nest at about two weeks old, and the male feeds them for about 12 days more while the female lays again. Pairs can start a new nest every 30 days or so, two to seven times a year. In the South nesting starts in late February or early March, and nests have been found in every month.² More: nests and eggs and baby doves.

Mourning Doves do not use nest boxes. If you want to give a pair a firmer base, NestWatch suggests a wire-mesh nest cone, wired into a horizontal fork of a live tree in shade, 6 to 10 feet up.⁸ Put it up well before spring.

Mourning Doves fly fast and straight, with sudden climbs, drops and dodges; on the ground they walk rather than hop and flick the tail up after landing. They forage in pairs when nesting and in flocks, sometimes of thousands, from late summer through winter, and roost at night in dense trees, heads drawn in.

In spring an unmated male advertises with a display flight: he leaves his cooing perch with loud wing claps, climbs 100 feet (30 m) or more, then glides down in a long spiral on wings held below his body. In the breeding season you may also see three doves chasing in a tight line, usually two males and a female, often an unmated male chasing a pair. Mates preen each other's heads and necks with gentle nibbles and "bill" before mating.

Mourning Doves are short-lived: Birds of the World puts an average adult's expected life at only about a year. In the US Fish and Wildlife Service's population model, built on banding, each year about 40 to 49% of adults and 28 to 31% of young birds survive.⁹

A few live much longer. The oldest on the US Bird Banding Laboratory's list was a male at least 30 years 4 months old, banded in Georgia in June 1968 and shot in Florida in October 1998. The next was 27 years 3 months, from California.¹⁰

Birds of prey, mammals and snakes all take Mourning Doves, though there are few numbers on which matter most. Falcons and the bird-hunting accipiters are probably the most effective birds of prey; raccoons, cats and dogs the likeliest mammals; and rat snakes are a main nest predator;² in an Iowa study Blue Jays, fox squirrels and cats took the most eggs and chicks. Nests and young are also often lost in high winds and heavy rain.

Probably the most important disease is trichomonosis, caused by a parasite, which has killed tens of thousands of doves in outbreaks; it was the commonest diagnosis, at 40%, in necropsies of 135 doves from the southeastern US.¹¹ Some doves feeding in fields planted for hunting also swallow spent lead shot.

The Mourning Dove is of Least Concern. Partners in Flight estimates about 150 million breeding birds, 130 million of them in the US and Canada, and scores the species 7 out of 20 for continental concern, which is low.¹² The North American Breeding Bird Survey shows a small long-term decline, about 0.2% a year from 1966 to 2025, with increases in Canada and the Northeast and declines in the West.¹³

The Mourning Dove is protected under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act and managed as a migratory game bird: federal frameworks set the outer limits for seasons and bag limits, and states set their own within them. Birds of the World calls it the leading game bird in North America.² The US Fish and Wildlife Service estimated about 329 million Mourning Doves in the US on September 1, 2025, counting that year's young, and hunters took about 15.5 million in the 2025-26 season, about 3 to 8% of the population a year.⁹ As of 2024-25, eight northern states, Michigan, New York, New Jersey and all of New England except Rhode Island, did not allow dove hunting.