Birdwatchers: Can you ID these birds?

[230RN]

Once again I have to dip into the vast pool of knowledge of APS people.

Can anyone ID these birds?  They started hanging around the building a month or so ago, and I believe the male was drumming for a mate on the raingutters before that, in late April, but the bill on this guy now seems shorter than I remember from the "drummer."  They're pretty bold around people, and one of them swooped at me while I was taking some other very bad pix of them from about thirty feet away.

They've become sort of building pets and apparently built a nest under a Juniper bush by the sidewalk.  Both of them just walked around down there on the ground by the bush as people walked by within two feet of them.  Somebody (not me) put some kind of bird feed down on the ground near their Juniper bush.

They make a beating, whistling sound when they take off but I don't know whether the whistling is a vocalization or from their wings.

These guys were within six feet of me when I hurriedly took this picture and I don't think the camera knew what to focus on and didn't have the time to autostabilize, but it is the best of three I took.  I "autobalanced" the picture with MS photo editor to improve it a little.

One of them was perched on my open screen door and I didn't realize it when I exited and s/he took off with that loud whistling sound and wingbeat and startled me.  Of course, I startled the bird just as much.

Anyhow, if any ornith-ey people out there can ID them, it would be appreciated.  They sorta look like pigeons, but they sorta don't, either, and they're quite a bit smaller.

Location: Golden Co, Date: 05 Jun 12.

Terry, 230RN

[grampster]

Doves.

[Tuco]

Mourning Dove (Zenaida macroura)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mourning_Dove

[brimic]

Mourning doves.

I had a nest of them in my lilacs on my patio ealier this spring.

[grampster]

We had two for years that nested under our deck at the lake.  I just noticed two hanging out by our feeder at the new house.
They will tend to return each year.

[RoadKingLarry]

Tasty, tasty doves.

[230RN]

Aha!  Never did much upland hunting.  Maybe I'll do a little upbalcony hunting. <kidding  (Guess I need a migratory stamp for that, huh?  Jeeze, 20-70 million of them harvested every year.)

I've watched them doing their mating dance and preening and so forth on the neighbor's balcony.  Those are the lousy pictures I took that I mentioned previously.

I thank ye one and all.

Terry, 230RN

[mtnbkr]

I love their call. That is one of the signs of spring to my ears.

Chris

[Chuck Dye]

Great, if potentially frustrating, hunting.  In my own "Don't get cocky!" moment, I was dove hunting in the Imperial Valley near El Centro and finally managed a double with the four rounds in my 12 gauge pump.  I was rather pleased with myself until, moments later, the guy fifty yards from me took four from a single flight... with a double barreled .410.

[K Frame]

"I believe the male was drumming for a mate on the raingutters before that, in late April, but the bill on this guy now seems shorter than I remember from the "drummer.""

Mourning Doves don't do that as far as I know.

Depending on where you are, you might have seen one of these:



Golden-fronted Woodpecker, more common in the Souther Plains states, but certainly in Colorado.

[230RN]

Ya, that's the rascally drummer, and thanks.  My neighbor chased it away with a broom and AFAIK, he never came back, except I thought maybe one of those mourning doves was him.  Generally similar except for the bill.

Before I retired, the damned magpies would gather in the trees outside my bedroom and wake me up much too early with their loud squabbling about .45 v 9mm or whatever.  Now that I'm retired and wouldn't care, I haven't heard them.  Magnificent birds, but they sure can be noisy.

Every once in a while a flock of some birds, maybe grackles, will pick out a car in the parking lot and bomb the heck out of it with their droppings.  Almost like they're practicing for a raid on Schweinfurt or something.  That'll happen for two days and then they leave it alone, but a couple of weeks or a month later they'll pick out another car and shmear it all up. 

The other day, from quite a distance, I saw a small bird harrying a hawk or something and that bigger bird finally went away in pretty much a straight line.  The little guy would get above the bigger one and swoop down on it and he'd make evasive maneuvers and the little guy would pull up above him and do it again. 

You get to notice a lot of stuff like that when you're retired.

Terry, 230RN

[S. Williamson]

... the damned magpies would gather in the trees outside my bedroom and wake me up much too early with their loud squabbling about .45 v 9mm or whatever.

 

[birdman]

Morning doves are famous back home for being dumb as rocks.

So a guy took 4 with a double .410?

I took two with my garage door one morning. :)

[RocketMan]

We've had a nesting pair of mourning doves returning to a tree behind the house for a year or two.  There are more pairs of them showing up in the area all the time, at least more than I remember historically being around.
The things were just thick around the Phoenix area when I lived there in the '80s.

[230RN]

Maybe they're starting to "learn" that the higher the human population density, the less likely they are to be shot at.

When they were walking around that Jumiper bush with me two feet away, and when I took that pic from six feet away, I thought those were the stupidest damned birds I ever saw.  I even thought for a minute that they were sick or something.

But birdman's remark about them being dumb as rocks made me think that their behavior of building a nest under the Juniper bush and allowing humans to walk within 2 feet of them was not such "dumb" behavior at all.

After all, as I mentioned, one of the humans put birdseed down next to the bush.

Hmmmm.... dumb? <scratches head>

Terry, 230RN

[Sergeant Bob]

Mourning Doves are just bush pigeons.