Fun Feathered Friends: Mourning Dove

As Jeannsies and her friend played at the park today, the friend called out "Dove" when she heard a Mourning Dove call! I was so excited! Mourning Dove is the only call Jeannsies has learned at this point. She also knows what a dove looks like. (We will be spending some good dove searching time during "D" week).

I realized that Mourning Doves are probably one of the most distinctive and easy to identify of the common birds in our area. It's a great intro to the fact that there are lots of different types of birds. If you think about it, it's probably kind of confusing when we just call everything with feathers that flies a "bird." We don't just go around teaching the kids "mammal" after all.

Jeannsies loves to identify different animals and make their sounds, so I figure now is a great time to introduce her to birding. I just have to be careful not to be a stage mother about it.
Anyway, this is a mourning dove:


And that's one of the most common ways to see them. They also like to walk around on the ground which makes them easy to spot and fun to watch.

They are closely related to pigeons, but they are native to the Central Valley. As my friend commented, their call sounds sad. I think that's where the forlorn name Mourning Dove comes from.

All of the birds in the pigeon family (Columbidae) feed their little ones "crop milk." Doesn't sound sweet? It is actually "secreted by a sloughing of fluid-filled cells from the lining of the crop" Yum!

The have a slightly pinkish tint, a fact I am going to exploit heavily to interest my little pink princess.

Doves and pigeons have a really fun walk to imitate too. I'm going to see if I can get Jeannsies pretending to be a dove. Yes that means I will probably be pretending to be a dove at a public park. Don't worry, once you've given birth in a room full of strangers, you no longer have any pride.

The Week of B

~Jeannsies is 30 months old~

This week was very busy and less organized as far as tot school goes. We had several play dates and lots of fun. I felt kind of bad because there are so many great things you could do with the letter B, but we were so Busy I had to keep it pretty simple.

She started off the week at auntie's house and made a Butterfly with a coffee filter and glitter pens.



We did our home invented letter sticker game again, she really likes that game!

We played with her "Bugs" (colored pom poms from Wal-Mart). While I was busy cleaning my room, I found her playing with the pom poms and some sticks like chopsticks! I was so excited because I have not been able to get her interested in transferring things with tongs or tweezers before. These pictures make it look like she was really using chopsticks. Actually, the sticks were very flexible, so they sort of grabbed onto the bugs if she pushed on them.

We did this Bb matching game. I am a horrible person, but I can't find where I got this! I will post the link as soon as I find it.

She did a good job with it, but she wasn't too interested in playing with it more than once.

We went to the library for story time, and along with lots of B books, we got some dance videos. She has loved this, and I am excited that she can take a dance class without me paying for it! She and I have done these videos together almost every afternoon and it is tons of fun. Next I'm going to look for some music class videos.

The big trip of the week was on Thursday. The little cousin, jeannsies, auntie and I went to the East La Loma Park to ride Bikes and look for Birds through our Binoculars. I was really impressed with this park, and it felt great to be close to the river.

It's hard to see, but we found this really weird worm in a puddle. It was about 10 inches long and really skinny. The girls looked at it for quite a while. Great stuff!

Throwing rocks in a puddle, the greatest part of the day! Now that is some quality nature play!


Jeannsies used her binoculars to look for worms. She found some.