The Carolina Turtle Dove, Plate 286 in Audubon's Birds of America

A branch of Stuartia covered in white flowers runs across the plate, and on it sit two pairs of doves. That is the whole composition of plate 286 in volume V of the octavo Birds of America, printed in Philadelphia in 1842, and Audubon explains every part of it in his text. The bird is the Carolina Turtle Dove, which a modern field guide calls the Mourning Dove, so this is the mourning dove Audubon plate of the octavo edition, one of 500 Audubon Birds of America plates in its seven volumes.

What the Carolina Turtle Dove plate shows

The lower pair is nesting. The female sits on her eggs, half hidden in the leaves, while the male leans in and feeds her from his bill. Above them a second pair is still courting: the female has walked out to the very end of the branch, wings and tail starting to open, ready to fly off, and the male is following. Audubon reads the scene as a little story about trust, and he is not subtle about it; the white blossoms, he says, are “emblematic of purity and chastity.”

The octavo plate legend reads “1. Males. 2. Females.” and carries the imprint of J. T. Bowen of Philadelphia, the lithographer who printed and colored it. The plant he named as Stuartia malacodendron, and he closes the account with a note on it: a small tree of rich ground near water-courses, found in little clusters in the southernmost states.

Herrick’s biography of Audubon notes that many new flowers and trees appeared in the octavo plates. This one keeps the plant it already had: the folio version of the Audubon Birds of America plates shows the same white-flowered Stuartia.

Audubon’s account, in his own words

The account opens on page 36 of volume V. These are its first paragraphs and a passage on flight, transcribed from the 1842 printing:

I have tried, kind reader, to give you a faithful representation of two as gentle pairs of Turtles as ever cooed their loves in the green woods. I have placed them on a branch of Stuartia, which you see ornamented with a profusion of white blossoms, emblematic of purity and chastity.

Look at the female, as she assiduously sits on her eggs, embosomed among the thick foliage, receiving food from the bill of her mate, and listening with delight to his assurances of devoted affection. Nothing is wanting to render the moment as happy as could be desired by any couple on a similar occasion.

The flight of this bird is extremely rapid, and of long duration. Whenever it starts from a tree or the ground, on being unexpectedly approached, its wings produce a whistling noise, heard at a considerable distance.

(Audubon, The Birds of America, octavo, vol. V, Philadelphia, 1842, p. 36.)

The rest of the account is more practical. Audubon notes that the doves breed throughout the parts of the United States he had visited, raising one brood in Connecticut and two in Louisiana, and that their flocks were small next to those of the Wild Pigeon, “two hundred and fifty or three hundred Doves together being considered a large flock.” He gives the egg as one inch and one-eighth long, pure white and slightly translucent.

He also records an aviary experiment that reads oddly now. His friend John Bachman put a male Carolina dove in a cage with a female European Turtle-Dove; the two paired and laid eggs, but the cage fell, the eggs (by then containing young) broke, and the American bird escaped. Audubon also discusses the taste of doves and advises the reader to try one. That is the 1840s: admiration and appetite in the same paragraph.

The Mourning Dove today

The modern species name is Zenaida macroura, and Birds of the World gives its range as southern Canada, all of the lower 48 states and temperate Mexico. It is rated Least Concern. The US Fish and Wildlife Service estimated about 346 million mourning doves in the United States as of September 1, 2023, and Birds of the World calls it the leading game bird in North America by total harvest; in the 2023 to 2024 season about 1 million hunters took roughly 16.8 million birds.

Audubon’s two white eggs still hold. Birds of the World confirms a clutch of two, with renesting possible about every 30 days and year-round breeding in warm regions, and both parents feed the young on crop milk produced in the crop wall. Birds of the World describes it as a habitat generalist that has benefited from the way people changed the landscape. The bird feeder guide covers feeding birds that forage on the ground.

The contrast with the bird printed on the facing plate is the reason this page sits close to the extinct birds list. Audubon put the dove in the same genus as the Passenger Pigeon. One of the two is now counted in the hundreds of millions, and the other has been gone since 1914.

Two editions of Birds of America: plate 286 and plate 17

The same subject had already appeared, much larger, as plate 17 of the double-elephant folio, titled “Carolina Pigeon, or Turtle Dove” and issued in 1827. The Carolina Pigeon Audubon published in London was an engraving by Robert Havell on a sheet about 26 by 38 inches, according to the Library of Congress; the folio ran to 435 hand-colored plates printed between 1827 and 1838.

The octavo is a different object. Francis Hobart Herrick’s biography records that it began to appear in parts late in 1839, ran four years, and carried 500 lithographic plates reduced by John Woodhouse Audubon from his father’s originals, with composite plates broken up and many plants added. The text changed too. In the folio years the descriptions came separately as the Ornithological Biography; in the octavo each account sits beside its plate, and this one cites its earlier version in the synonymy as “Aud. Orn. Biog., vol. i. p. 91.”

The naming moved with the science. The folio used Columba carolinensis; the octavo places the bird in Ectopistes, the “long-tailed doves,” together with the Passenger Pigeon. So the Carolina Pigeon Audubon drew in the 1820s and the Carolina Turtle Dove of 1842 are one bird under two names. Anyone tracing the mourning dove Audubon plate has to say which edition is meant: plate 17 in the folio, plate 286 in the octavo.

How this page’s number works

The number 00506 in this address is the site’s own running count of text sections in volume V, not a plate or page number. Volume V opens at 00500 with the Zenaida Dove. Short genus introductions count as sections, so 00504 is the introduction to Ectopistes, 00505 the Passenger Pigeon, and 00506 this account. How the book divides its plates among the volumes is laid out on the Birds of America overview.

Audubon’s last word in the account is about the plant, not the bird. Of the Stuartia he wrote that “the wood is brittle and useless, the flower destitute of scent, but extremely agreeable to the eye,” and that he had never met it in the Middle, Western or Northern districts.