At first, I just saw two or three large feathers on the back porch. No big deal.
Then there were a couple more on the sidewalk. Again, no biggie.
It was only after I had done my lap around the back yard and got back to this point that my brain started to register all of the other feathers, well hidden by their coloration matching the dirt. Aside from the two on the sidewalk, how many can you find on the dirt? (I’ve got eleven so far, but every time I look I seem to find more.)
Now that my stupid brain knew what to focus on, I started spotting them all over a circle about ten feet across. Sometimes when this happens I see far, far more, but I think it depends on whether the mourning dove was in the air or on the ground, how high the hawk or owl was diving from, and whether the predator ate here or just made the strike and then took its meal off elsewhere to eat or feed its chicks.
The tiny, fluffy feathers all around the right side of the sprinkler head at the bottom were the confirmation for me. The bigger feathers can sometimes shed naturally, particularly if one of the big, fat mourning doves goes crashing into the sliding glass door. (They can really make a “thud” that echoes through the house!) But for there to be a handful of those finer (insulating?) feathers from underneath the big flight feathers, something violent needed to happen.
The hawk or owl (and possibly their chicks) eat today, while we’re one mourning dove down. Circle of life and all of that. We have a handful of hawks and owls in the neighborhood – we have dozens and dozens of mourning doves every morning when The Long Suffering Wife casts her bounty of bird seet upon her adoring throngs of feathered friends. (She’s like Snow White out there…)
We Love The Stars Too Fondly 