Have the same birds been nesting at my pond for years?

“A pair of mourning doves have nested at my pond every year for the past ten years. Are they the same birds?”

We looked in Noah Strycker’s The Thing with Feathers, Julie Zickerfoose’s The Bluebird Effect, and Ohio Bird Watching by Bill Thompson III and found that there’s no real way to be sure. The average lifespan of a wild mourning dove is a year and a half, but some have been known to live for ten years or longer. According to AllAboutBirds.org, the oldest dove was at least thirty years old when he was killed.

Mourning doves travel in flocks but tend to be monogamous during the breeding season. The male stays close to his mate while she forages, guarding her and showing off by inflating his crop to display the iridescent feathers on his neck. The pair can produce 2-6 clutches in a season. The female lays two eggs at a time, which both parents incubate for about two weeks. Once the young hatch, they will remain in the nest for two more weeks.

Birds that return to the same nesting place have a good chance of pairing up with the same mate, so it’s possible that our patron is seeing the same two birds, though their short lifespans make it unlikely. Mourning doves will sometimes reuse their own or other species’ nests, and that tendency may also be in play.