For the past few weeks I have both gone to sleep and awoken to the sound of mourning doves.
Not an unpleasant sound, but at five o’clock in the morning I would rather still be sleeping.
There were only a few of them in the area last year, but this year there seems to be a whole brood which has apparently decided to take up roost just outside my bedroom window. There are a number of collective nouns for a group of doves including cote, dole, dule, bevy, flight and piteousness. I could probably add a few, but I won’t.
Lets just say that when I go to sleep, I prefer the sound of silence.
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Even when I am out at the lake, I expect to fall asleep to the sounds of crickets and bullfrogs, loons and maybe even sometimes an owl, but not morning doves. While I do appreciate that it is mourning and not morning dove, I just don’t think of their mournful cooing as a night sort of sound. These guys never seem to quit – day or night.
Mourning doves are light grey and/or beige-brown in colour. Males and females are similar in appearance. Their call is almost always uttered by the male bird, not the female, and is in fact an enticement to a mate or potential mate. The species is generally monogamous and both parents incubate and care for the young. They range from southern Canada to central Mexico, and can raise up to six broods of two young (squabs) per year – more than any other native North American bird.
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All I know is there are a lot of them around here this year, and lately, I feel like I’m sleeping right outside, in a tent, with about two dozen doves perched on a branch right overhead.
As a kid, I used to look forward to sleeping outside in a tent. Whether pitched in our backyard or at a campsite, it was always an adventure. I can still smell the slightly mildew scent of our old Wood’s canvas tent and hear the hiss of the Coleman lantern. Listening to crickets and bullfrogs was an integral part of the whole experience. I used to try to stay awake just so that I could listen to their nighttime choruses. The cry of a loon as it calls out to its mate has always stirred something primordial in my very being.
It’s hard to explain but, for me, there is something special about falling asleep in the great outdoors. It makes one feel a part of nature.
Over the years, I have slept in a lot of tents – although not that many recently. Nowadays, I prefer a soft mattress to the hard, cold ground. I have slept outdoors in a hammock, indoors in any number of cabins and trailers, under the stars, on a bed of cedar bows, on top of a picnic table in a national park and both beneath and inside a canoe at the side of a lake. I have unintentionally fallen asleep, several times if the truth be told, while fishing in a 12-foot aluminum boat out on the lake, and I have fallen sound asleep, too many times to count, while sitting in one of my Adirondack chairs out in the back yard. I once fell sound asleep at the planetarium, but I guess that doesn’t really count as being outdoors. Anyway, my point is that I don’t mind a bit of fresh air when I’m sleeping and I have never had any trouble – at least not until now – falling asleep to the sounds of the creatures that inhabit the night.
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Of course, there was that time I heard a bear just outside my tent when I was camping in Kootenay National Park. It kept me awake, wide awake, until I eventually got up enough nerve to peer out the tent flap and discovered it was only a raccoon rummaging around. As I recall, that was pretty much about the same time I decided I prefer sleeping on a nice, soft mattress in a cabin or trailer. There is also something to be said for solid walls and a door.
Sleeping inside on a mattress, however, doesn’t really matter when I am continuously being woken up at five o’clock in the morning by a cote, dole, bevy or malicious gang of mourning doves perched outside my window. I wonder if mourning doves fly south for the winter?
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