Mourning Dove: the crop-filling feeder bird

The short answer

• Mourning Doves swallow seed whole into a crop and digest it later, so a visit is a fast bulk load rather than a meal. That is why they arrive, sit, gorge and leave.
• They feed on the ground or on a flat tray only. They cannot use a perch, so a tube feeder with short perches is dove-proof by design.
• White proso millet and cracked corn are their top foods, both cheap. Feeding those separately, low and away from your main feeder, is the whole answer to dove crowding.
• Eight doves working a station eat on the order of a quarter pound of millet a day on our working figures, which is roughly 25 cents at typical prices.
• Dove flocks pull in Cooper's and sharp-shinned hawks, and spilled seed on the ground pulls in rodents. Both are managed by sweeping up, not by removing the doves.

A Mourning Dove is not eating when it sits on your tray for eleven minutes swallowing seed without pausing. It is loading. Seed goes down whole into the crop, a stretchy pouch at the base of the neck, and the actual digestion happens later, somewhere with better sightlines, once grit in the gizzard has ground the hulls apart. Everything a dove does at a feeder follows from that one piece of anatomy.

What the crop changes#

For a chickadee, a feeder visit lasts two seconds: grab one seed, carry it to a branch, hammer it open, and often cache the next one. For a dove, the seed is not opened at all at the feeder. So the optimal strategy is the opposite: get onto the food, stay on it, and swallow as fast as possible until something makes you leave.

That produces four behaviors people ask about constantly.

• Long, motionless visits. Ten to twenty minutes on one tray is normal.
• No caching. The crop is the cache. A dove carries its store internally rather than hiding it in bark like a nuthatch or a blue jay.
• No manipulation. Doves peck seed off a flat surface. They cannot hull a seed, hold one in a foot, or extract anything from a port.
• Two clear peaks. First light and the last hour before dusk, the evening load being the one that carries the bird through the night. In hard weather that evening peak lengthens noticeably.

Where a dove can and cannot stand#

Our dataset rates Mourning Doves 4 out of 4 for ground feeding, and lists their feeders as ground, platform and hopper. That is the complete list, and the reason is mechanical.

If you have doves you did not want, the fix is in that table. Take the tray off the tube. If you have no doves and want them, the fix is also in that table: put seed on something flat and low.

What they actually want#

Skip for this species: Peanuts (in shell), Suet, Mealworms, Nectar, Fruit / jelly.

Millet and cracked corn are the top pair, and both are the cheapest things you can buy. That is convenient, because doves eat a lot.

Here is the working arithmetic, using our own model rather than a published figure. A small seed-eating bird gets through roughly 10 to 15% of its body mass in dry seed a day in cold weather. A 120 g dove is therefore in the range of 12 to 18 g of millet daily, or about 45 to 68 kcal at millet's 378 kcal per 100 g. A flock of eight doves working your tray comes to roughly 100 to 145 g a day, about a quarter of a pound, which at typical millet prices is around 25 cents a day and a little over 3 lb a fortnight. Run the same flock on sunflower instead and the cost roughly triples for no gain in attractiveness. Doves are the one common feeder bird where buying the cheap seed is the correct answer, not a compromise. The wider cost picture is in seed cost per calorie.

Two things not to do. Do not put out whole corn on the cob or large quantities of corn in wet weather: corn molds fast and moldy corn is genuinely dangerous, covered in moldy seed. And do not feed bread, which fills a crop with something that has no useful nutrition, as in what not to feed birds.

The tray takeover, and how to undo it#

Doves do not fight for a feeder. They occupy it. A 12 by 18 in tray is about 1.5 square feet, and three doves standing on it cover essentially all of it. Nothing smaller can land, so the juncos, sparrows and cardinals that were using the tray move to the edges or leave.

A three-part fix that works in a weekend:

1. Split the food by height. Sunflower and hearts go in a hanging tube with no tray, 5 ft up. Millet and corn go in a low tray or straight on the ground, at least 20 ft away and out of the sightline of the tube. Doves take the millet, small birds keep the tube, and everyone is fed.
2. Cap the ground portion. Put out only what is cleared by dusk, about 1 to 2 cups for a flock of eight. Leftover seed on the ground overnight is what brings in rats and mice, and every ground-feeding setup lives or dies on that discipline.
3. Give the small birds an exclusive. A wire-cage or weight-activated feeder guarantees a dove-free option even if the doves work out something else. See caged versus weight-activated feeders.

Making sure it is a Mourning Dove#

Long pointed tail with white edges, small head, a black spot on the side of the neck, pinkish buff underparts, and a whistling flutter of the wings on take-off made by the feathers rather than the voice. The mournful five-note coo is often mistaken for an owl.

Eurasian Collared-Doves, now widespread, are larger and paler with a square-ended tail and a thin black collar. Rock Pigeons are far bulkier. In the Southwest, White-winged Doves show a bold white stripe along the closed wing, and the tiny Inca and Common Ground Doves are half the size.

When they do not come#

Doves are present nearly everywhere in North America, so absence is almost always about the surface rather than the region.

• Everything is hanging. No flat surface at or near ground level means no doves. This is the cause in most yards that report none.
• Only sunflower is on offer. They will take it, but millet on the ground is what pulls a flock in and holds it.
• The ground is covered. Deep snow or a thick mulch layer hides scattered seed. A raised low tray of 6 to 12 in solves it, and it drains better than bare ground.
• A cat patrols the lawn. Ground feeding and outdoor cats do not coexist. Move the tray up and away, and read cats and feeders.
• You cleaned them out with a hawk. Give it a week before concluding anything.

Through the year#

Doves are present all year across most of the United States, and northward into southern Canada in summer, with northern breeders moving south from September. Flock size at feeders is smallest in the breeding season and largest from November through February.

They nest earlier and more often than almost any other feeder bird, sometimes from February in the South, so a pair on a flimsy stick nest in March is normal. Both parents feed the young on crop milk, a secretion from the crop lining, which is another consequence of that same pouch. Keeping millet available through spring and summer supports that cycle at almost no cost.

Frequently asked questions#

What do Mourning Doves eat at a feeder?

Almost entirely seed, and they favor small seed they can swallow whole. White proso millet and cracked corn rate top-tier for them, followed by black oil sunflower, sunflower hearts and safflower, which they take readily. They do not use suet, peanuts, mealworms, nectar or fruit in any meaningful way. If you want doves, a scattering of millet on a low tray does more than any change of feeder.

Why do doves sit on my feeder for so long?

They are filling a crop, not eating a meal. A Mourning Dove swallows seed whole into an expandable pouch at the base of the neck, then flies to a safe perch and digests it over the following hours with the help of grit in the gizzard. The bird's job at your tray is to load as much as possible, as fast as possible, before something disturbs it. So it stays put and keeps swallowing rather than taking a seed and leaving.

How do I keep doves off my bird feeder?

Use geometry rather than deterrents. Doves cannot cling or perch on a short stub, so a tube feeder with 2 in perches and no tray under it excludes them completely. Remove the wrap-around tray, hang the feeder rather than mounting it on a wide platform, and put a separate low tray of millet 20 to 30 ft away. The doves get fed, the small birds get their feeder back, and nothing has to be chased off.

Are Mourning Doves aggressive at feeders?

Not in the way grackles or jays are. They rarely chase other species and mostly ignore them. The problem is physical: a dove weighs about 120 g, roughly six times a chickadee, and three or four of them cover a standard 12 by 18 in tray completely. Smaller birds simply cannot land. It is occupation rather than aggression, which is why spreading the food across more surfaces fixes it.

Do Mourning Doves need grit?

They benefit from it. Because seed is swallowed whole, the gizzard grinds it using small hard particles the bird has eaten, and doves take grit and sand from roadsides and bare ground routinely. If your yard is entirely lawn and paving, a shallow dish of coarse builder's sand or crushed oyster shell set near the ground tray gets used, particularly in winter when bare ground is frozen or covered.

Why did all the doves disappear at once?

Usually a hawk. Dove flocks are the main reason Cooper's and sharp-shinned hawks visit suburban yards, and after a strike the survivors will stay away for several days. Look for a scatter of gray feathers on the lawn. The other common cause is a wing-clap flush from something harmless, after which the flock circles and returns within twenty minutes, so if they are back the same morning it was not a hawk.

Sources and further reading

1. Mourning Dove Cornell Lab of Ornithology, All About Birds Measurements, diet, crop feeding and range
2. Feeding Birds Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Project FeederWatch Seed preferences and feeder styles used by ground-feeding birds
3. Mourning Dove National Audubon Society Guide to North American Birds Distribution and seasonal behavior