Bunny the Dove - Part One

A mourning dove has made our back porch its home now for a few years. It’s a fairly large porch with three brick columns, each with a small ledge that is about eight inches by four inches. This ledge is where she decided to build her nest. We decided to call her Bunny after her first brood hatched on Easter morning.

When Bunny first perched on our porch, us opening the door would literally scare the crap out of her. She would flap around the porch, smashing her head into the ceiling and pooping until she finally hit so hard it would knock her low enough to clear the awning. I’d say we played a game of Porch-Bird Limbo once a day for a week to 10 days. The day came, however, that she just decided to not fly away. Maybe one day she realized that we had never really bothered her and that we meant her no harm. Maybe she just got tired of bashing her head and decided that nothing we might do could possibly be that painful or humiliating. Maybe she suffered a closed head injury and no longer had the ability to determine that something might be dangerous. I don’t know.

What I do know is that Bunny became part of the family. We never fed her, although we discussed it on more than one occasion. My contention was that feeding her might only make her stay once the eggs had hatched. A scenario I did not want.

See, she was fun to watch, get up close pictures of and watch through the window. I already had a dog, two cats, a fish and a tarantula. I didn’t need or want a bird too.

I hadn’t done anything more that hunt mourning dove until Bunny adopted us and our porch. Now, don’t get all upset about the whole hunting thing. Due to a lack of opportunity, I haven’t hunted in years. And I assure you, when I was hunting, more birds were killed by lightning than by shotgun blasts from me. All the same, about the only thing I knew about mourning doves is how they look and how they taste.

I just assumed that after Bunnies two chicks had “flown the coop,” we’d have our porch back. I cleaned the bird poop off the brick column, and there was plenty. Washed off the porch, and said good-bye to porch-birds forever.

But it was not to be.