Doves settling down in Houston
Readers frequently ask about white-winged doves crowding around backyard bird feeders.
Tell me about it. The doves gather in a veritable convention at my house. They hold meetings at the birdbaths and in the front and backyards. I try to distract — accommodate? — them by spreading seed on the ground to keep them off the feeders.
I even put seed under a backyard window that has an inside platform where my cat sits like an inveterate birdwatcher. I thought that would scare the doves. But the big, fat doves scared the cat!
I used to see the doves primarily on trips to the Rio Grande Valley and San Antonio and farther west. There’s nothing like waking up in a tent at Big Bend National Park and hearing the melodic song of a white-winged dove, which resembles the words who-cooks-for-youuuuu, like someone playing an ocarina.
Nowadays, the melody wakes me up at home. I first heard the doves in spring 2009. I thought to myself, “Land sakes alive!,” as my grandmother used to say when she heard crows cawing around her vegetable garden.
It wasn’t that the whitewinged doves were scouring my wife’s flower garden, but that they had arrived. I knew they were coming because the birds had been expanding their range since the 1980s.
Except for small pockets of white-winged doves in places like South Houston
and Galveston, the birds largely occupied South Texas and spread westward into southern New Mexico, Arizona and California. Quite abruptly, South Texas birds, in particular, began moving.
Their push northward in less than 30 years has been astonishing. They have taken up residence in western Oklahoma and parts of the southern Gulf Coast. They’re being spotted on the Atlantic Coast.
Their range may be expanding because of several factors. Conversion of brush lands and thorny woodlands to farm fields depleted their native habitat. Catastrophic South Texas freezes in the 1980s wiped out citrus groves where the doves often bred.
Then, suburban sprawl from Houston to Dallas attracted the doves to a savannah-styled habitat of spacious neighborhoods with shade trees such as oaks and pecans. And backyard bird feeders proliferated with a reliable supply of dove food — seeds!
Maybe climate change had something to do with the phenomenal northward expansion, but I can’t interview the doves to find out.
Anyway, they’re here to stay. Some wander away from our yards like vagabonds during the winter. But they’ll be back.