The Mourning Dove appeared to drowse, trance-like, its eyes nearly closed. The night had been cool, but the sun offered warmth. The slight movement came as the dove fluffed its feathers then relaxed its wings, draping them outward to expose fully its back and rump to the morning sun. A Mourning Dove lay belly down on the soil of a garden bed, its plumage of earth-tone browns and grays blending perfectly with the earth. There is little time to stare out the window and into the trees, searching for something unseen.As BirdNote writer Bob Sundstrom sat by the window one morning recently, watching birds flit through his yard, a subtle movement caught his eye.

It will not be a part of their lazy summers, already rendered less so by modern life. And I worry that my children will never hear the mourning dove. “It’s one of the great sounds of nature - of urban ecology,” he said. He enjoys their song, which he said “doesn’t have any sharp edges to it.” Twenty five years later, all sorts of damage is evident.īut over in Culver City, Jordan is lucky: He’s heard mourning doves, as recently as a month or so ago. Such a classic story of human intervention: The chemicals were meant to help. City staff noted that the ashes, then about 70 years old, suffered “severe health-related problems” tied to “the use of chemical injections over many years for the control of insects.” The Arizona ashes, mighty and deciduous, with craggy bark and saw-tooth-edged leaves, were removed by the city of Beverly Hills following the adoption of the 1996 Focused Street Tree Master Plan. “To me,” he said, “civilization is just a stucco tsunami that is covering everything - and things disappear.”Īmong the things that are gone: the street trees that sheltered the mourning doves of my youth. Jordan worries about what he calls the “innate rapacious greed” of man. “When a species like that leaves, you feel so empty.” “It was a lovely sound,” he said.īut about 15 years ago, Jordan began to hear it less. He would wake up in the morning to their sonorous calls. There was a time when spotted doves were common there. Jordan, 76, has lived in Culver City for 30 years. The caller’s name is William Jordan, and he’s the author of books including 1991’s “Divorce Among the Gulls,” a collection of essays about the natural world. And when they speak, Garrett confirms what the caller undoubtedly already knows: There are fewer spotted doves than before.

Unlike the mourning dove, it has long shown clear signs of decline here. Garrett told me about an Angeleno who contacts him every year or so to inquire about the local population of spotted doves, a species native to South Asia that was introduced to L.A.

But there also was more than just reassurance in his voice. I got the sense that Garrett is accustomed to validating the worries of addled callers nursing one avian anxiety or another. “I have heard people say that they’ve seen and heard fewer,” Garrett said. Turns out, I am not alone in noticing an absence. But it happened only once, and not again. neighborhood, I had been delighted to hear the wistful call - a song used by males to attract females. I told him that earlier during the pandemic, while walking in my Central L.A. I had called Garrett to ask about the local mourning dove population. “In any given local area, mourning doves might be less common and heard than they were 10 or 20 or 50 years ago,” said Kimball Garrett, ornithology collections manager of the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County.

The report said the state had experienced a nearly 4% drop in its mourning dove population each year over the preceding 10 years. Fish and Wildlife Service report show that mourning dove populations are declining in many states, including California. There are tens of millions of mourning doves, also called turtle doves, in the U.S., and it is legal to hunt them in most states, including California. There are no reliable data on Los Angeles’ mourning dove population.Īnd mourning doves are far from endangered: They are one of the most abundant bird species in North America and found across the U.S. It is an eerie loss too, made all the more unsettling because it is not exactly provable.

Turtle dove sound