The Parable of the Doves

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A loud flapping of wings.  I looked out my window in time to see a mourning dove land on the roof opposite with audible bump.  The poor thing sat there, looking stunned.  Then another flapping of wings.  Another dove flew over the gutter onto the higher roof.  It was then that it dawned on me that these two were being pushed out of the nest.  I’ll admit that I doubted the wisdom of a dove building a nest in the neighbor’s gutters, especially when the tropical storm dumped several inches of rain on us last week.  Sometimes animals know what they’re doing, however, and even after the storm I could see the mother dove winking at me, her head just above the level of her aluminum-sided home.

The stunned youngster sat there for quite some time.  As soon as Mom was gone, the one that had flapped above climbed back into nest.  Was I watching a parable unfold?  Mom flew back when chick number two decided to flap down and join its sibling.  Throughout the morning I watched as the mother returned, landed in sight of her offspring, then showed them how to get down to the ground.  Ensuring they were watching, she waddled to the edge, dropped, and spread her wings.  She did this several times as the young birds kept carefully away from the edge.  Mom, it seemed to me, was growing impatient.  She’d occasionally fly back to peck them, but the siblings simply wouldn’t take the leap.  She started coming back to feed them instead.  I wondered how she managed with two beaks jammed into her own at the same time.

I kept an eye on the drama the entire day.  By the time I turned in for the night, the two youngsters were bedded down next to each other on the roof.  Their mother had landed, cooed insistently to them, but they dutifully ignored her, afraid of falling.  We look at birds and think they’re built to fly.  It’s one of their greatest assets.  It is the kind of gift, however, that requires overcoming obstacles.  Just because you can fly doesn’t mean that you’re not afraid to fall.  There’s learning involved.  Such episodes of animal intelligence always inspire me.  We could learn so much if only we would take the time to see how birds learn to fly.  The transition from coddled nesting to the freedom of the skies is not easy, and being built to fly still requires overcoming a very natural fear.

Serenity

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A few weeks back I posted about a dove that had built a nest on an unused planter on our front porch.  I’d read that mourning doves choosing your house was a sign of peace and tranquility.  Each morning I went out for a jog, the dove’s little head would pop up and she would eyeball me.  There was no fear in that gaze, but rather serenity.  She was sitting on her eggs and knew I wouldn’t hurt her.  Several days ago she was gone from the nest.  We were out for a family walk when my daughter noticed.  We crept up to see two good-sized chicks sitting there instead.  Within days we had a couple of young birds flapping around the yard, trying to learn how to live on their own.

I missed the dove, though.  The nest was empty.  I felt less bad about stepping into somebody else’s bedroom every time I went out the door, but still, I’d grown accustomed to having her—them—on the porch.  This week when I again went out for a jog (the jogging never ends), she was back.  She looked at me with a knowing stare.  Ours was apparently a safe house.  Mourning doves, I read on the Cornell University ornithology site, can raise a brood of two in six to eight weeks.  From the laying of eggs to abandoning the nest is only a two-month proposition.  The website then went on to say that doves will sometimes return to their previous nest.  This one obviously had.

Peace is a rare commodity these days.  Stress seems to be our daily matrix.  How long will our jobs hold out?  Will opening up the economy lead to a second wave?  (Likely yes.)  Will we be able to make mortgage payments if our companies can’t weather the storm?  Who really owns this house anyway?  There is a serenity to relinquishing anxieties of ownership.  A kind of freedom to belonging to a world that will, at least in some nations, help you make it through a crisis intact.  There’s a wisdom to the animal world that we too often ignore.  We can find peace if we look for it.  One cold morning I found one of the chicks sheltering on the leeward side of our fence.  I took her some sunflower seeds since she looked so miserable.  I don’t know if she ate them or not, but I knew that we humans had benefited from having her under our roof.  Such gifts are worth more than might be imagined.

Peaceful Lessons

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We are all, I think, looking for hope.  Probably due to the way I was raised, I often seek signs.  There’s no way to know if said signs are mere coincidences or the more intense variety known as synchronicities, yet we have a hopeful sign here at home.  On our front porch we have some plant hangers.  Spring crept up on us this year and we haven’t got around to putting any pansies in them yet.  The other day when I was stepping out to get the mail, I noticed feathers in one of them and feared there’d been a bird-related accident there.  As I took a step toward the planter, the head of a mourning dove popped up.  She blinked at me curiously, but didn’t fly away.  I knew then that she had built a nest in the as-yet unused planter and she was sitting on her eggs.

Monday was fiercely windy around here.  And rainy.  I wondered how any birds could fly in such weather.  A mourning dove flew up—perhaps one of the pair on our porch—and landed on the electric wire leading to our house.  The wire was swaying and bucking so furiously that the dove constantly had to shift and fluff and flutter just to stay in place.  The poor bird was in constant motion.  Then it showed a sign of animal intelligence.  There’s a much larger wire that runs down our street, from which other houses are supplied.  It’s more stable in the wind due to its girth.  The dove flew up to that wire instead.  There it was able to perch without having to constantly adjust itself to the gusts.  Peaceful and intelligent.  That’s what the world needs.  I have hope.

The dove has long been a sign of peace.  It’s understood that way in the Bible.  It was the dove that brought an olive twig to Noah, indicating that although all he could see was water there was, somewhere, dry land.  These days we need to be reminded that although it seems that the storm will last forever, even hurricanes eventually exhaust themselves.  The dove, clearly not happy about the horrendous wind buffeting it on that wire, nevertheless persisted in a kind of stoic optimism that things are as they should be.  There is great wisdom in the natural world.  If we can get to a window we can see it playing out before our very eyes.  Now when I step out the door, I glance at the dove, and she looks back at me.  We wink at each other.  She doesn’t fly away, for she understands.  She has a wisdom to which we all should aspire.