Doves

When I was young and growing up in South Dakota, one of the most delightfully mournful summer sounds was the early morning, late evening cooing of doves. It was a soothing balm in the evening after the excitement of all-day youthful games, in the morning a sound to draw me up from the deep sleep of innocence. Yes, I was an innocent. What else could one be in mid-twentieth century South Dakota with parents who paid attention to my comings and goings, who loved me enough to keep me morally straight?

Now I’m old and living in Arizona, surrounded by thousands (what seems like millions) of white wing doves, all of which coo their little dove hearts out morning noon and night. Their omniaudience goes on from dawn to well after sundown—“Who who kuh whooo, who who kuh whooo,” saying to each other something about their sexual availability. And they seem to engage in that activity all day long, humping and whomping their wings in their frenzy to continue the species. The females then build their little stick nests in whatever tree is available, the male long gone after he’s fulfilled his coital duty. Yesterday we watched a female sitting on our neighbor’s fence, alternately fanning her wings upward, then lifting her butt in the air with tail feathers spread out, seeming to say in dove fashion, “Here I am, boys. Come and take me.” She did this for three or four minutes with no takers. She finally gave up and flew away, looking for more fertile territory. What was once a soothing sound is now enough to drive us crazy.

But we also noticed a rare visitor to our tall arbor vitae, a pair of cardinals, bright red against the green of the trees, with songs that took us back to upstate New York and younger, doveless times.