2025: Year of the Mourning Dove

A roundup of winter birding traditions.

Welcome to Owl My Children, a monthly newsletter where I recount some exciting bird moments from the past month and talk about mourning dove milk.

Happy New Year! It’s the season of new pajamas and new planners, two of my favorite things. I also love a snowy day, especially when it’s so cold outside that I feel justified sitting on the couch and doing nothing. I spent the morning harvesting digital potatoes in Stardew Valley (this is Michael’s attempt at getting me to enjoy video games).

I have always liked the months of December and January, and those months only got better when I started birding, thanks to all the wonderful birdy traditions they involve. Here are a few I’ve enjoyed this past month:

1. Seeing shorties with the family

For the past three years, when I’ve visited my family in Ohio for Christmas, I’ve dragged them out to the middle of nowhere to a place called Zion Ridge Road, where there are, occasionally, short-eared owls.

My parents have indulged me in many birding activities over the years, and every once in a while I’m able to show them something really good, like the time we watched a bald eagle attempt to pick off a bufflehead that was hiding in a raft of coots, or the time I took them to see skydancing woodcocks. But often my bird schemes are a bust. Like the time I promised my mom I would find a wild turkey for her, because they are SO RELIABLE in the UW Madison Arboretum. I’d have to put in some serious effort NOT to see a turkey there. But the one day my parents were in town and I took them to the Arb, there were no turkeys in sight.

The short-eared owls on Zion Ridge Road are turning out to be another turkeys-at-the-Arb situation. I just want to show my parents some owls, dang it!

In Wisconsin, on our first try, my husband and I had two short-eared owls fly over our heads (I wrote about this in an old newsletter). We have never been so lucky in Ohio, but I can’t help but hope. Maybe this time a short-eared owl will be perched on a fence post. Maybe one will be lurking in the scraggly bushes on the side of the road or hunting low over the field. Thanks to eBird, I’ve seen photographic evidence of each of these scenarios (and linked to them above, in case you want to wistfully click through them as I so often have).

Back in 2022, we saw one short-eared owl veryyyyy far away, so far that I couldn’t quite make it out even with my camera’s 600mm zoom lens. That year, we also heard them barking, and now every year I force everyone to stand there on the ridge in silence, quietly shivering, while I strain my ears for the telltale sound. (Doesn’t that sound like fun?)

Long story short: We struck out on the ol’ ridge again this year, as we did in 2023. But both times we ran into other birders who assured us that we’d see a shorty, no problem. “We were just out here last night and they were right over in that field!”

Still, some good things came out of our trip this year: 1) We saw a flock of trumpeter swans doing circles in the sky, honking like sad clowns. I love swans and never see them in Pittsburgh, so this was a delight. We also saw several kestrels. 2) We didn’t freeze our butts off as much as we did the year before. 3) My brother-in-law joined the group even though he had never gone birding before. (Not sure I convinced him.) 4) On the way home, we drove by my dad’s coworker’s house, which is infamous for its sheer number of Christmas lights. You could probably see it from the moon.

Top left: 2024. Bottom left: 2023. Bottom right: 2022. Same ridge, same hat, same lack of clearly visible owls.

2. The Christmas Bird Count

Michael and I participated in the Pittsburgh Christmas Bird Count again this year, completing another year at Emerald View Park in Mt. Washington. The count was on December 28, and the morning was shockingly (disturbingly) warm and sunny, with none of last year’s rain in sight. Unfortunately for us, several of the trails were closed, but we did venture down a mountainside path we’d never seen before and enjoyed the views. We saw 21 species this year and 148 individual birds, compared to last year’s 19 species and 209 individual birds. (We did not see nearly as many rock pigeons this year, which skewed our individual numbers last year.)

The best part about this year’s CBC? It was so nice outside that Michael agreed to continue birding with me even after we were done on Mt. Washington! We ventured to Duck Hollow as well as Schenley Park, where we saw some good birds including a redhead hidden amongst mallards, a redheaded woodpecker, and a brant. Brants are like tiny versions of Canada geese, and in fact this particular brant seemed to think it was a Canada goose, because it was hanging out with 150+ of them. I loved this bird so much that I’m cooking up a future newsletter about it, so I’ll spare you the details for now.

The brant! What a great bird. Photo by me.

The CBC was my last big birding day of 2024, so when I got home, I started looking at my total species for the year and doing some year-end reflecting. I don’t like to be the kind of person who cares about the number of species I’ve seen each year, but I do care, so I might as well embrace it.

In 2024:

• I saw 291 total species in the world, compared to 279 in 2023. (My current life list stands at 398 species!) It was my biggest year yet, thanks to trips to Florida, the West Coast, and Amsterdam.

• I added 86 lifers to the list.

• My friends and I were the first to spot that rare loon in Vegas, which you’re all sick of hearing about and I will never stop talking about.

• I birded with lots of friends all over the place (including Nate, who referred many of you readers to this newsletter. If you don’t know Nate and you’re looking for funny weekly bird content, his Substack is the place to be!).

• I only saw 158 species in Allegheny County, which would have been pretty low back in Madison, but it’s my own fault for not wanting to drive very far and for refusing to chase birds out of sheer stubbornness.

Overall: A very good year.

Left: CBC 2024. Right: CBC 2023. Notice the somewhat forced happiness in photo 2. Also notice that in photo 1, Michael’s hoodie no longer has a string. RIP hoodie string.

3. First birds of the year

Lots of birders enjoy waking up on New Year’s Day and rushing to the window to see what their first bird of the year will be. It reminds me of a Seventeen magazine quiz. What does your favorite pasta dish say about your love life? But I like this tradition, and I liked all those silly quizzes.

This year, Michael and I spent the majority of New Year’s Eve without power. Our neighborhood in Pittsburgh had a freaky power outage that lasted most of the evening. There wasn’t any bad weather, and it was contained to a few streets; for a while, the restaurants right across the street from us had power, and we glared at them from the darkness of our dining room table. Then they lost power, too. We ended up driving to a restaurant five minutes away and had a nice time eating alongside all the other Pittsburghers who had no idea there were people in their midst who had no electricity. Then we came back and played rummy, and I busted out my new radio, which I presciently asked for for Christmas even though Michael said we didn’t need one because we’d always have the internet. Ha!

(“But we still had internet on our phones,” Michael protested as he read a draft of this newsletter. True, but what if the outage lasted WEEKS, Michael, and our phones ran out of juice, and our car ran out of gas, and we were all living in a world of darkness? What then??)

The outage only lasted 5 hours or so, and our power came back in time for us to watch Ryan Seacrest working one of his fifty jobs. I went to sleep looking forward to my first bird of the year and also to another beloved tradition: spending New Year’s Day birding with Michael.

Even though Michael isn’t a huge bird nerd, we started doing this in 2022, and he claims to enjoy it. I think it’s because he likes video games, and the first day of January is kind of like a video game for birders. At the start of the new year, your regional eBird stats re-set to 0, so every bird you see is essentially a new bird. It’s like when there’s a new season of Apex Legends and everyone’s rank gets re-set, and it’s a free-for-all to climb your way back up the ladder. (I asked Michael to give me this analogy because I do not care about Apex Legends.)

The birds you see at the start of the year are called FOY birds (First of Year). Part of our tradition is that when we’re out birding, we like to shout obnoxiously, “FOY robin! FOY house sparrow! FOY titmouse!” for pretty much everything we see.

This year, January 1 was quiet and cold. There were no birds in the ornamental trees on our street, no birds flying overhead. We bundled up and got in the car, heading once again to Duck Hollow, where we hoped the place would live up to its name and provide us a variety of waterfowl.

On the way, we saw our first bird of the year: a mourning dove.

While trying to find a photo to insert here, I realized I haven’t taken many photos of mourning doves, probably because I take their familiarity for granted. But here’s a photo I took on a warmer day. Good borb.

I love a mourning dove. I love all doves and pigeons, and I have a secret hope of building a dovecote in my backyard one day. I love their songs. I love that they make milk for their babies. (It’s crop milk, which means they make it in a pouch in their necks and regurgitate it into their babies’ mouths. It’s very nutritious. Also, both the mom and dad pigeons can make the milk!) I also love a fun fact I recently learned from the book What It’s Like to Be a Bird, which is that doves and other pigeons bob their heads when they walk in order to keep their vision focused on their surroundings. If you blindfold a pigeon or make it walk on a treadmill (researchers actually did this) so their surroundings remain the same, they do not bob their heads!

However, in terms of a New Year’s omen, I’m a little concerned by the word “mourning” and its implication for the year ahead. Thankfully someone at Gardening Know-How magazine has written an article to interpret everyone’s first birds of the year. She says that my mourning dove sighting will put me “on a path to new beginnings.” I appreciate the positive spin!

Michael and I had fun finding other FOYs on New Year’s, and despite being quite chilly, we ended up with 19 bird species. We saw 11 common mergansers swimming in the Monongahela River alongside 50 or so mallards, and we also saw 8 or so people take their clothes off* and run into the river to do a polar plunge. They scared all the ducks away, but we forgave them. I was freezing in my parka, and my winter-booted feet were numb within 10 minutes, but these people floated around** in the water for at least that long. Respect.

When we got home, we felt pretty accomplished, and now that the electricity had returned, I busted out my new heated blanket and my new heated foot bath. (I got some fantastic Christmas presents this year.)

I hope your traditions have been enjoyable this winter, that your FOYs have been fun, and that you’re staying warmer than a puffed-up mourning dove who’s reduced her body temperature overnight to help conserve energy.

Love,

Holly

*Never fear, they were wearing swimsuits.

**They were not dead! We checked.

Michael took this photo of his favorite bird, the American robin, on our CBC.