What does a mourning dove symbolize?

The short answer

Mourning doves are usually read as symbols of peace, love and grief — peace from the dove's long religious history, love from their close pairs, and grief from the slow, sad call that gave them their name. Many people take a mourning dove as a sign of comfort after a loss.

Where the name comes from

The mourning dove's call is a soft, low coo-OO-oo, oo, oo. To early English-speaking settlers it sounded like lamenting, and the name stuck. It is often mistaken for an owl, especially in the early morning when doves call most. The call is mostly made by males advertising a territory or calling to a mate, so it is closer to a love song than a lament.

The other sound doves make is the whistling of their wings on take-off, which comes from the feathers rather than the voice.

The dove in religion and peace

In Genesis, Noah sends a dove from the ark, and it returns with an olive leaf, showing the flood waters have gone down. In the Gospels the Holy Spirit descends on Jesus at his baptism "like a dove". Those two images made the dove the symbol of peace, hope and the spirit in Christian art.

In 1949 Pablo Picasso's lithograph of a white dove (strictly a pigeon) was chosen as the poster for the World Peace Congress in Paris, and the dove has been the international peace symbol ever since. Wisconsin named the mourning dove its official symbol of peace in 1971.

Love and pairs

Mourning doves often stay paired through the year, and both parents share incubation, the male usually by day and the female overnight. Like pigeons, they feed their young "crop milk", a protein-rich fluid made in the throat. They nest many times a year in warm parts of the country, and a pair may raise five or six broods in a season. Their nests are notoriously flimsy platforms of twigs; you can sometimes see the eggs from below.

Common, but not ordinary

The mourning dove is one of the most widespread and numerous birds in North America, and also the most hunted game bird on the continent, with millions taken each year under regulated seasons. It thrives in towns, farms and deserts. Doves can drink by sucking water up without tilting their heads back, which most birds can't do.

Doves feed on the ground, picking up seed, and they will happily clean up under feeders. Millet and cracked corn on a low tray or the ground will bring them in.

Because they spend so much time on the ground, doves are easy prey for cats and hawks. Scatter seed near low shrubs rather than in the middle of an open lawn, so they have somewhere to dive when a Cooper's Hawk comes through.

A mourning dove at your door

A dove that keeps returning to a porch light, gutter or hanging basket is usually choosing a nest site. If eggs appear, leave the nest alone for about four weeks. Incubation takes about two weeks, and the young leave about two weeks after hatching.

Mourning dove or pigeon?

Mourning doves are slimmer and smaller than the Rock Pigeons of city streets, with a small round head, a long pointed tail edged in white, and soft grey-brown plumage with black spots on the wings. Pigeons are stockier with short square tails and come in many colours. Doves and pigeons belong to the same family, and English uses both words loosely.

Doves feature in other traditions too. In Islamic tradition, a pair of doves is said to have nested at the mouth of the cave where the Prophet Muhammad hid during his flight from Mecca, helping convince his pursuers the cave was empty. In ancient Greece and Rome doves were sacred to the goddesses of love, Aphrodite and Venus, which is one root of the dove as a symbol of romance. Two doves still appear on wedding invitations for the same reason.