Leaving Home

Just outside my office window, perched on top of the window unit air conditioner, is another mourning dove family. For those of you who read my earlier blog about the flower basket full of birds on my front porch, this story might ring familiar. The air conditioner doves occupy the second nest at our house, and if you count all the babies these two families have produced, there have been a dozen. Two eggs at a time, each in succession, all in one season. Somehow, I feel proud.

I have a front row seat to the air conditioner doves – the chair where I sit typing is maybe three feet away from them. They don’t seem to mind that I am practically on top of them, especially when I reach over to use the fax machine, inches from the window. Mama keeps an eye on me, and the scruffy-looking babies seem curious about what goes on inside the house – or maybe they are just enchanted by the window itself, pacing back and forth and running their beaks along its surface.

Lately, they are all flapping wings and clouds of tiny feathers. They are learning to fly. Yesterday, one of them left the ledge, oh so briefly, and lit on a nearby tree branch. The other stood with wings flapping and I watched as its little feet levitated an inch off the surface, then back down. They are so big compared to the tiny eggs where they’d nestled under their mama’s feathered breast. Like my own babies, there is a pair of them. And, like mine, they are almost ready to leave. They are breaking my heart.

Oblivious, of course. Just being birds.

Their mama flies away frequently, leaving the babes with plenty of room for learning. They totter at the ledge, turning their heads quizzically. They stretch their wings, unfold them like accordions, and fluff their feathers. They pick at each other, then settle down to sleep side by side. When Mama returns, they attack her. She is still feeding them, a comical (and violent) act that involves babies pecking around at her breast, then inserting both their beaks into hers as she regurgitates whatever it is she’s gathered to eat. She looks exhausted. And is that blood on her beak? Or just some red markings? Every time I see this spectacle I’m grateful we humans use spoons and mashed banana to feed our young. Mama also seems to be eating their excrement, to keep the nest clean. The babies are getting so big, I wonder how long this will go on – and she probably does, too.

Today, the babies are hopping and flapping the six inches from the nest to the branches of the mimosa tree. Sometimes they almost miss the ledge and scramble to get up, scratching their little claws on the metal of the air conditioner surface. Sometimes they get their wings caught on a branch and awkwardly rearrange themselves before trying again. At first, Mama stood by briefly, sitting on baby #2 after baby #1 flew off – as if it were too much to watch them both totter off at once. Then she flew, and after a minute or so Baby 2 took off as well. Both babes are in the mimosa tree now. By tomorrow, or maybe the next day, I’ll find them two stories down in the garden – or they’ll be gone entirely.