Last year I watched Blue Jays build a nest in the cedar right outside our living room window. I watched the mother sit on her eggs for days, I worried about the mother and her babies during an awful windstorm that hit, I made notes on the fluffiness of the babies feathers and waited for the day that I would see them fly. Unfortunately in the middle of the night I heard a raucous at the bird feeder and the next morning they were all gone! Me being sad is a bit of an understatement.
This year, that same nest was taken over by a Mourning Dove. At first I wasn't that excited because the mourning dove was never my favorite bird. Their cooing kind of gets to me. At any rate, I grew to love watching the Mourning Dove sit on the nest for days winking at me and anticipated the baby birds hatching in the near future. And then it happened. The dove left the nest. I didn't even get to watch the birds hatch and grow up like I had with the Blue Jays. I inspected further and noticed that their nest was quite disheveled and was very loose.
Could something else have gotten them too? Why did they leave? Could it be because they felt the eyes of a predator?
A few days passed since no one lived in the nest and I noticed Mango obsessively watching something outside the other night. I got up to check it out myself and noticed two Mourning Doves on the ground all puffed up together. This really confuses me, the dove couldn't be thinking it would be safe to have her babies on the ground.
Maybe the Mourning Dove was never going to have babies and just wanted a nice nest to sleep in for a couple weeks. I really don't know what to make of all of this bird business, but if this Mourning Dove has been playing tricks on me for the last few weeks, I'm going to have to put it at the bottom of my favorite bird list once again!
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