.

 

 

It was somewhere around the year 1966 when I first heard it. It was a sound that always started at the first blush of dawn. That wasn’t the only reason it was disturbing, it also was a non-relenting, continuous ooah-cooo-cooo-cooo-cooo, a remorseful kind of call. It was no sound to greet the new day and I found it extremely irritating, quite aside from the fact that it was waking me up so early each morning.

Finally one morning, I could stand it no longer. I would track down this nuisance. Should I take binoculars or my shotgun? I didn’t have to to travel far from my house before I located the source of the plaintive call. There sitting on a telephone wire was, of all things, a PIGEON!
Now, pigeons were fairly common around the village in those days.

The cavernous, high-ceiling, steel-girded buildings of the then abandoned Oval Wood Dish factory, with their broken windows, were home to hundreds of pigeons. Also, dozens of pigeons daily collected under the marquee of Billy Donovan’s Park Street movie theater, feasting on the popcorn spilled or discarded by movie goers. This pigeon, however, was different. It resembled pictures that I had seen of a bird called a passenger pigeon, but as far as anyone knew, the very last passenger pigeon died in a Cincinnati zoo in 1916. At one time, I learned, it had been the most abundant bird in the world. Nearly eighteen inches long, handsome in pastel shades of blue, gray, rose and brown, it swept across the sky in immense flocks that sometimes contained billions of birds literally blotting out the sun for hours, almost as if an eclipse had occurred, during their passage.

It has been reported that “when they gathered to roost for the night, they broke great limbs from forest trees with the sheer weight of their numbers, and the sound of their wings and the noise of their settling could be heard for miles.”

Could this be a passenger pigeon?

How could a bird that numbered in the billions upon billions disappear without a trace? Could a few survivors have found refuge in the Adirondacks?

A phone call to Mrs. Jack Delehanty, Sr., arguably the community’s leading bird authority, provided the answer. Mrs. Delehanty informed me that I was probably seeing (and hearing) a mourning dove. Also variously known as a “turtle dove,” a “wild dove,” or a “rain crow.”
She also told me that it does resemble the altogether-extinct passenger pigeon, and it is often mistaken for that bird, so often, it seems, that ornithologists take little interest in announcements that such a pigeon has been seen. Mrs. Delehanty further informed me that seeing a mourning dove this far north (1965) was most uncommon. Please note that the mourning dove is now (1999) very common in this locality. As an untrained observer, I’m not sure why this is so, except that we now have more open areas (clear cuts, storm damage, etc.) interspersed with trees and woody shrubs that are essential habitat for a sizable mourning dove population. What I do know is that their sudden appearance is significant from a historical as well as an ornithological perspective.

So, while I still personally find its continued call at the first light of day to be annoying and to sound like hopeless sorrow and remorse (unlike, I’ll admit, some folks who find it to sound like tenderest love and devotion), isn’t it nice to know that this area has provided a sanctuary that allows the bird to hold its own in what was a declining population?

Remember, only a few years ago E.H. Easton, in his two-volume edition of Birds of New York State, outlined the doves’ distribution, thus “the mourning dove is fairly well established in all parts of New York State excepting the northern portion above 1,000 feet in elevation, where it is rather uncommon. It is occasionally found about the borders of the north woods as at Lake George, Old Forge, Ausable Forks, but is more characteristic of the . . . warmer portions . . . than the cooler districts.” In 1965 no reported observations were made in this locality.

So — welcome, mourning dove. Now you know why we humans find this such a great place to live! You will recognize this dove by its call (ooah-cooo-cooo-cooo). It looks like a pigeon but is slimmer, smaller in size, and has a long, pointed tail. Oh yes, that whistling sound heard so often lately at dusk . . . that’s the doves’ wings making a whistle that can be heard for up to 200 yards or more. The call, by the way, is performed primarily by unmated males to attract females and establish a pair bond. Once paired, they will remain together throughout the breeding season and perhaps for life.

Fifteen years ago, I ran into a deer hunter who told me that the only game he had seen that day was a wild turkey. When I stopped laughing, he told me that he was from Pennsylvania, and “by gosh, I know a turkey when I see one.”

Today local residents are feeding and observing wild turkeys on their front lawns. Local wildlife specialist Jon Kopp and his colleagues at D.E.C. don’t bother (unless it has a collar) to record moose sightings any longer because they are so plentiful.

Turkey vultures now contend with numerous bald eagles over the road-killed deer carcasses put out as food and attraction, a bird that not long ago was uncommon, if not rare, in this locality. Canadian geese have become so plentiful (and prolific) that they have become a problem nuisance on lawns and docks.

Some wildlife like the blue bird has made a comeback because we have stopped poisoning it with DDT and other toxins (thanks to Racheal Carson), but the sudden appearance of other wildlife to our region represents dramatic wildlife changes. What the implications are, I’ll leave to the experts.

Copyright William C. Frenette Collection