The Doves of Our Lives

White-winged dove season is finally over. There are only a handful of these beautiful birds remaining, and soon they will be gone too, back to Mexico, where they spend the winter. It is always a sad time for me, because I can't know for certain that I will be here to greet them when they return next spring.

Below is a collage I made to celebrate my love affair with doves over the last few years. Most of the photos are of white-wingeds, but there are some mourning doves here too. Some notes on the collage follow.

Upper row shows doves being doves, doing dove things. The fourth photo over, of the long-beaked juvenile white-winged, was an exceptionally clueless dovelet who repeatedly flew into a brick wall in the carport of our previous home. He always seemed okay afterward, and I'm hoping he survived.

The central large photo is a nearly grown mourning dove fledgling who hung out in my private patio for a couple of weeks. I took the photo because I thought he was beautiful. The upper photo to the left of the mourning dove was one of my most-recent white-winged fledglings being fed in the patio by its mother. Adult doves produce a nutritious liquid in their crop (called "pigeon milk"), which they pump into the babies in a procedure that looks like a vicious mugging.

Immediately to the right of the central dove is a male white-winged holding a curved stick in his beak. I spent around an hour one morning watching him and his mate building a nest on the precarious top of a pole. The process was fascinating.

Just to the right of the nest-builder is a very, very special mourning dove who nested in a particular yucca at Tohono Chul for three years. She had the best-made, safest nest I ever saw for a dove. I thought she was a genius. I used to imagine that some day her offspring would take over the Park, producing a race of super-smart doves. But after three years the yucca grew in such a way that it no longer had a perfect nesting spot, and I never knowingly saw her again.

Finally, the small dove in the lower right-hand corner is an Inca dove I photographed in the Walk-in Aviary at the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum. Inca doves were very common when I first moved back to Tucson in the late 1980's, but gradually disappeared from the central part of town and are now seldom seen. They are beautiful, sweet, very small doves with cinnamon-colored underwings and feathers that appear from a distance to be scaled. Nobody knows for sure why they have disappeared, but a common theory is that the very large Cooper's hawk population here has done them in.

If you have questions about any of the other doves in the collage, feel free to ask them in the "comments" below. Every dove has a story.

St. Francis and the Lizards

We have now lived in our "new" house nearly three years. The yard came with a small statue of St. Francis. Though we are not Christians, I love the idea of a saint who loved animals watching over the critters who come to visit. From our first days here, there has been one or another Spiny Desert lizard that likes to perch on Francis' head. Here are some of my favorites.

Cedric, a fairly large desert spiny, was the first lizard I named. This is his typical perch--on the side, facing west, his tail relaxed and extending down Francis' cowl. Late in that first summer, I found poor Cedric's body lying on the back porch, his beautiful belly colors still glistening. I have no idea what the cause of death might have been.

Cedric was followed by his girlfriend, unnamed. She was somewhat smaller than Cedric and preferred to sit more securely on the top of the head.

A considerably smaller lizard, whom I named Cedric Jr., appeared the following year:

The lizards have come and gone, but never has warm weather passed without at least one "regular" making him- or herself comfortable on the saint's accommodating head.

This year, I've had a special lizard, a very large female I named Heloise. When I first saw her in this pose, I burst out laughing. 

A few days after I took the photo, I noticed that Heloise had lost her tail. That did not stop her from her favorite activity, however, and finally I discovered why St. Francis' head is so popular. In addition to his function as a sunbathing perch, it turns out he is a hunting blind!

With her tail beginning to grow back, Heloise was in her usual spot the other day. I was puzzled, though, because it was cloudy, not suitable for basking. I was just about to change positions so I could get a shot of her tail stub when she very suddenly leaped off St. Francis' head and literally dived into the lantana bush to the west. I saw her wrestling with a large insect, but couldn't tell what sort it was, or if she managed to eat it. Nevertheless, I feel confident that tailless Heloise will continue to thrive in my Francis-blessed back yard.

How is a Snake Like Ginger Rogers?

It was said of  the actress/dancer Ginger Rogers that she could do everything her partner, Fred Astaire, could do--but she did it backwards and in high heels.

It’s sort of the same way with snakes.

Looking at these amazing creatures, you can’t help but notice how different a snake's outer (superficial) body plan is compared to the four- and two-legged creatures we are most familiar with. And yet--at the same time--snakes are in many ways very much like us--they have a brain, a heart, digestive and reproductive organs, and many other similarities, some obvious and some not so (for example, they only have one functioning lung). They can feed and shelter themselves, protect themselves from danger, procreate--in fact, do just about anything a creature with arms and legs can do…

But they do it all without  arms or legs, hands or feet.  How do snakes manage their amazing acts of survival? They do it through a series of anatomical adaptations that allow them to use their mouths in ways we bipeds could only dream of, and their strong, muscular bodies to help manipulate objects. Let’s take a closer look at how some of these amazing adaptations work.

Image from PetEducation.com

The best place to start is with the skull. Snake skulls are mobile compared to mammal skulls. Whereas our skulls are solid, with the different parts fused together, the separate parts of a snake's skull are more loosely connected, with ligaments, allowing the bony parts of the skull to move in ways our skulls cannot. For example, Instead of a bony inner ear, snakes (and birds) have an extra bone connecting the lower jaw to the skull, which allows a snake to open its mouth as wide as 180 degrees. This ability helps explain how a snake can swallow something bigger than its head.

Another important difference between us and snakes is that the  two halves of a human’s lower jaw are fused together at the chin. Snakes don’t have a chin; instead, their jaws are connected by a ligament, which allows the two halves to move separately. Snakes’ teeth (not including fangs, which are used to deliver venom in venomous snakes) are small, sharp, and pointed backward--toward the gullet. Thus, when a snake has prey in its mouth, its sharp teeth can hold the object tightly while the snake uses the two sides of its jaws alternately to  “walk” the prey back, through the mouth and toward the gullet. No need for a knife and fork, or even for grasping hands or paws.

The snake’s windpipe has a special extension, the glottis, that allows the snake to breathe while it is swallowing something large. As the meal moves further along, the body begins to expand because of another anatomical feature--or rather, the lack of one. Unlike humans and other mammals, snakes don’t have a breastbone to tie the ribs together in the front of the body, so the ribs can expand as the meal makes its way down the digestive tract.

The below photo, by Carlton King, shows how this all works: it is the last in a series of photos showing a kingsnake devouring a diamondback rattlesnake that was seemingly bigger than the kingsnake!


Snakes have  many other amazing adaptations that allow them to live their slithery lives, and I hope to discuss more of them in future posts. I find snakes awesome in every sense of the word, and I hope this short discussion has helped you begin to feel that way too.