Mourning Dove

 

Erika and I do not see many Mourning Doves in the Olympia, Washington, area. Our paucity of observations is a bit odd since Wahl et al. (2005) write that this dove should be fairly common all year in the south Puget Sound region. Perhaps this situation is due to our mostly birding away from agricultural land, the preferred habitat of these doves. We occasionally see or hear them, especially in the Kennedy Flats of neighboring Mason County, where we found several birds in a forest/clear-cut mosaic landscape on 18 August 2020. 

Mourning Doves are found across North America, through most most of Mexico to southern Canada. Birds vary from dark in the east to pale in the west. Eastern and western races are described, with intermediately colored birds in the Midwest. Otis et al. (2020) warn, however, that genetic analysis inticates that the “separation of these two groups into sub-species [has] minimal genetic support.”