Mourning Doves - James

James

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Mourning Doves

James<br>Aug 23, 2026

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A few weeks ago, we noticed a slender brown and gray pigeon sitting in the white pot on our fire escape. No matter what time of day, the bird always seemed to be there until we realized it wasn’t just one bird. It was two. And they were not pigeons, they were mourning doves sitting on two tiny eggs.<br>Each day we would peer out the kitchen window to see the parents brooding. They would rotate -- one would come in the morning, the other taking their shift in the evening. It became a bit of a ritual to check on them. No matter the 100 degree heat, the pummeling rain where they’d ball into themselves squinting their dark eyes, there always seemed to be a dove there. My wife wanted to construct a makeshift umbrella. I argued against.<br>One day, we woke up to see a chick. And then another the next.<br>The chicks grew crazy fast -- their little fuzz into bristles into feathers. Sometimes you would catch a glimpse of the parents feeding the babies only to stop and cock their heads when they saw you in the window. The rest of the day there would always be a parent there sitting on top of them, guarding them from the blue jay that would hop around the escape.<br>The older chick was bigger than the one that hatched the day after. The younger chick was so small we thought it might fall through the opening in the fire escape slats if it ever decided to hop out.<br>Yesterday it did.<br>While I was running, my wife sent me a picture of the young chick out of the planter on the slats under a branch. When I got back, it was still there on the fire escape. By late afternoon, it had not moved -- even with the adult parent there feeding the older chick.<br>We didn’t know if it could get back into the nest on its own. We both were fearful that touching the baby could lead to the mother abandoning it. When we asked Claude, it said that was largely a myth. We asked if we should go out onto the fire escape to help it back in. Claude said yes.<br>My wife had stepped onto the escape a few times to water the plants without disturbing the doves. We thought we could conduct a similar in-and-out operation.<br>We found old gloves in our toolbox, opened the window and I climbed out of the window.<br>I count 16 planters on our fire escape, most of them bunched into one corner, though I still couldn’t tell you what was growing in any of them.<br>I moved to the far side of the pots. The parent and older chick froze. I slowly tugged back the hanging branch to expose the young chick so I could reach in.<br>I had never picked up a bird before. I kept thinking about Chuck Palahniuk’s anecdote about Cheryl Strayed and an injured baby bird where she picked it up and closed her hand around it rather than let it suffer.<br>I was about to reach to grab the chick when my wife told me to stop. She went into the apartment and grabbed an old towel to lay down around the planter in case the chick panicked so it wouldn’t fall through the slats.<br>The towel was set. I bent down and cupped the bird into my hands. Its body was smaller and more delicate than I imagined. I felt it writhe and squirm against my palms.<br>As I stood to put the bird back into the planter, the adult dove and, to my surprise, the older chick took off in a flutter. I placed the young chick in the planter but it, too, panicked.<br>It jumped. But not out. Down.<br>It flew into the brick wall of our building, its clumsy wings opening and closing against nothing as it dropped.<br>I looked over the fire escape. Three floors down, there was a gray splotch on our neighbor’s slat that looked like the chick. It was duct tape.<br>My wife came through the window. We walked down the escape. There was no sign of the chick.<br>We went back inside and left the escape alone in hopes they would come back.<br>We started arguing about how we could be so stupid. I don’t think I even read the full response before putting on the gloves. We weren’t looking for advice. We were looking for it to tell us yes.<br>Then I did what any normal person ruminating would do, I opened Claude.<br>I looked up whether the chick could have survived, the difference between nestlings and fledglings, if the parents would be able to find the chick and if they would come back to the nest. The same way we asked an hour earlier before I put the gloves on. The same tool I was blaming an hour ago. And the same one I’m turning to for comfort now.<br>My wife found a pair of binoculars in the drawer in the TV stand with all of our random cords and batteries. We kept checking the kitchen and window from our bedroom that gave us a different vantage point.<br>An hour later, a dove returned to the escape.<br>But it wasn’t the young chick.<br>It was the other parent ready to start its shift.<br>Its family was not there.<br>We watched the bird as it hopped around searching different parts of the escape, the planters. We thought it might be able to hear the young chick cooing close by when it dropped a few levels down. It came back...