The New Tenants of Our Balcony
I live in Queens, in the dense neighborhood of Jackson Heights. My street, offering a straight path to Grand Central Parkway, carries a consistent, high volume of traffic. Day and night, the honks of cars, the sirens of ambulances, and the chatter of pedestrians rolls by my windows.
To keep it short, it’s not a very natural place.
However, to my surprise, we had new tenants take up residence on our balcony this past June. They were shy at first, coo-ing to each other before fleeing in a flutter. Soon after, I caught them littering my balcony with some stray pieces of grass and twigs. Following that, the now familiar coo-ing caught my ear as I headed out to work, so I poked my head outside, and there they were, staring at me, just above a pair of eggs held in a tousled nest in the crook of my stepladder.
That was June 7th.
Among the most common birds you’ll see in New York City, mourning doves are often overlooked. Smaller than their ubiquitous cousins, the pigeons, they are a brown bird whose wing feathers are speckled with black and tail feathers edged with white. Look closer, and undertones of pink and green become apparent on the neck and breast.
They are known to mate for life, and build nests, a bed of grass and twigs thrown together in a not-too-orderly fashion, in trees and shrubs, but they can also be found nesting on the ground, and–in cities–on ledges and other coverts provided by human architecture.
City mourning doves must be more inured to humans than their country cousins, as the pair on my balcony didn’t seem to mind my daily intrusions. So long as I kept a distance of two to three feet on our shared balcony, the dove incubating the eggs made no effort to flee, but merely watched me with an unblinking gaze.
The incubation period typically lasts about fourteen days, and sure enough, on June 21st, my roommate reported seeing a couple of bald baby birds on the balcony. I had already made up my mind, to track their growth in daily photos, and was glad to get a glimpse of the two chicks early the next morning.
The chicks (which are called squabs, and, more hilariously, squeakers, once they are weaned) were nearly black in color with strands of their future brown feathers growing all over their body. The parents stayed around the clock, in shifts of about twelve hours. As the chicks became bigger, I would often find one adult sitting beside them. On one occasion, I startled them as I came out, and was surprised by how the adult seemed to stretch out their body to cover the chicks.
Usually, they became inactive when I went to snap my daily photo, but there was one occasion when I managed to glimpse their feeding ritual. The two chicks stood in front of the parent and reached up towards either corner of the beak. The parent shook its head, and regurgitated some food, which the chicks received simultaneously on either side. It was not at all like a robin dropping a worm into baby’s mouth.
Doves and pigeons do not regurgitate the food that they’ve been eating. Rather, they produce milk in their crop (an expanded section of the lower esophagus), and this is what is brought back up as the squabs’ food. It’s described as being like “pale yellow cottage cheese”. By the tenth day, the squabs will be weaned off this milk, and graduate to the typical diet of mourning doves, grains and seeds with an occasional insect.
By day eight, the feathers of the chicks were more developed, and they had taken on a brown hue, but edged with white. On day ten, I found the two sitting alone, watching me with the same stillness that their parents had. Seeing a couple of nestlings left alone, once their this grown up, is not a sign of abandonment. They are likely no longer subsisting only on crop milk, but are also eating seeds, perhaps requiring the adults to spend more time foraging. The adult did return that evening, and over the subsequent days, the chicks would be left alone for long periods of time, but never abandoned.
The squeakers continued their steady growth over the following days, and by July 3rd (day thirteen), looked ready to fly the coop. My final family portrait shows the similarity between the juveniles and the adult, separated by an inch or two of growth, and a bit of green eyeliner tastefully applied. I, unfortunately, left town that day for the July 4th holiday, and never got a proper goodbye. Mourning doves typically leave the nest by the fourteenth day—Independence Day in this case. They had gone when I returned.
Though doves can have two or three clutches in a season in the northeast, I did take the opportunity to remove their nest and reclaim my stepladder. They were good tenants, not at all noisy, just a few coos in the early morning or afternoon. I was glad to have the opportunity to watch them raise a new generation. There was a bit of clean up to do, however, as their bathroom habits are not much to speak of.
