Break on through to the other side - not

Splat! Did an angel come to an untimely end against our living room window that fateful day? Thankfully not. African doves had a fascination with our house windows or what was behind them; we never got the opportunity to ask which. Some, not I, would say it was (spoiler alert) a miracle that they somehow survived.

In our previous home, we regularly saw evidence of doves colliding with our windows, and sometimes heard the impact - thwak! boing! those were big picture windows - which sounded like they were going full speed, yet miraculously we never found a corpse or even a stunned bird on the ground. Surely a bird with little crosses in its eyes, just like in the cartoons? No...sniff.

Bif! Bam! Pow!

Here was a typical episode - even though you can see the window needed a full cleaning, the poor old dove gave it a good clobber with its right wing. I was in another room at the time and heard the impact, but found only this eerie angel wing as evidence of a close encounter of the glass kind. My best guess is our feathered friend had a sore wing but no damage to his skull or teeny bird brain.

This gives you an idea of the window in context - you can see the wingprint just above the orchid. The window doesn't look so dirty from far away, so maybe the dove's eyesight wasn't good enough to pick out the furniture and lack of grass and garden within the living room - or perhaps the afternoon sunlight reflected off the window in such a way that it couldn't see the danger (or my beautiful orchid) in front of it.

And here's a splat pic from another day which shows this bird definitely didn't hit his head - rather the other end. Imagine, if you will, trying to put the brakes on in the air. Window 1, Dovebutt ouch. I could only imagine its expression on its surprised little bird face...I wish I'd seen it....

What kind of dove was it?

Now that's a good question. We'll never know. We had at least four kinds of doves regularly visiting this garden - the red-eyed dove, laughing dove, Cape turtle dove and mourning dove along with an alarming selection of large feral pigeons (those are big brutes). This video gives you an idea of the range of their appearance and calls.

Video source

The flocks and pairs often intermingle, so we regularly hear all of these sounds mixed as well. It makes it difficult to tell at any given time unless you know the dove types and their respective calls well which individuals are making which sound.

Just being silly today

So we can't tell which ones are the Kamikaze birds - whether it's the laughing doves doing a Joker, the mourning doves committing hara-kiri because they just can't deal with life any more...or whether all the different kinds of doves sometimes go for the window crash.

We moved to another home two years ago, also in Johannesburg, and still have at least those four types of doves regularly visiting the garden - but so far none has crashed into any of our windows that we know of. Could we unknowingly have been living in the middle of some mystical dove shrine, which drove them with an irresistible force to near death experiences? Or could they have been the equivalent of bird adrenaline junkies?

Or do they just have really bad eyesight and kinda small brains?