THE TURTLE DOVE. (Columba turtur.)
“Go, beautiful and gentle Dove,
And greet the morning ray;
For lo! the sun shines bright above,
And the rain is pass’d away.” Bowles.
This Dove brings to the heart and mind the most pleasing recollections; its name is nearly synonymous with faithfulness and unvariable affection. The male or female is so much attached to its respective mate that it is said, perhaps with more poetry than truth, that if one die the other will never survive; however, the author of these observations was an eye-witness to the death of a female Turtle Dove, who was unfortunately killed by a spaniel, in the absence of the male; the disconsolate survivor, after having in vain searched everywhere for his mate, came and mournfully perched upon the wonted trough, waiting patiently for her to repair thither in order to get food; but, after two days of unavailing expectation, he, by spontaneous abstinence, pined and died on the place. Such examples are not common; and we believe that, when not domesticated, the appearance of another female, in the time of coupling, sets at defiance all natural propensity to constancy, and puts an end to the much-famed disconsolate widowhood. Their general colour is a bluish grey; the breast and neck of a whitish purple, with a ringlet of beautiful white feathers with black edges about the sides of the neck. Nothing can express the sensation which is excited in a feeling mind when the tender and sweetly plaintive notes of the Turtle Dove breathe from the grove on a beautiful spring evening:
“Deep in the wood, thy voice I list, and love
Thy soft complaining song, thy tender cooing;
Oh, what a winning way thou hast of wooing,
Gentlest of all thy race—sweet Turtle Dove!
Thine is a note which doth not pass away
Like the light music of a summer’s day;
Hushing the voice of mirth, and staying folly,
And waking in the breast a gentle melancholy.”
Inglis.