Few birds are as “Pure Michigan” as mourning doves! Sure, our state bird, the robin, is great and all, but it flies south for the winter! Which…is kind of how some of our state’s residents also live, whom we affectionately and only slightly derisively refer to “snowbirds” since they live in Michigan during the warmer months, then live farther south in the winter.

The mourning dove lives in Michigan year-round. It doesn’t migrate. Its distinctive cooing call, used for attracting mates, is also one that my husband – who did not grow up in Michigan – always associated with Michigan. Whenever he’d visit one of his grandmothers, aunts, uncles, etc. who lived in Michigan when he was growing up, said he always enjoyed hearing the sounds of mourning doves.

We have quite a lot of them living around our house. A couple of months or so we got to witness something really, really exciting involving mourning doves! Yes, we got to see them doing the “mattress mambo,” only instead of a mattress, they used the surface of a parking lot light fixture. They got a little touchy-feely with each other afterwards (lots of nuzzling)! Sadly, I didn’t have a decent camera with me that night, so I couldn’t take any photos (which you know I totally would)! Hey, if you’re going to have sex out in public, you gotta expect people to take photos of it!

So…did we see the result of that light fixture tryst when we were enjoying some drinks in an outdoor bier garten last night? I didn’t have my real camera with a zoom lens, so I did my best with my tablet and its optical zoom. My husband and I both took these photos – and (ugh) getting down on the knees to be able to capture these images wasn’t as easy as it used to be. But our Herculean efforts (LOL) were worth it!

Dig if you will, some pictures of fledgling mourning doves (see what I did there):