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Thursday, August 17, 2017

Blue eyelids... Baby's got blue eyelids... (Along With Other Great Features)






Atop this entry are a few photographs of mourning doves spending time in my rooftop garden. As you can see, their eyelids are blue. This fact has often caused me to put a spin on an Elton John song ("Blue Eyes"), where part of the lyrics are:

"Blue eyes
Baby's got blue eyes
Like a deep blue sea
On a blue blue day..."

Only when I see the mourning doves, I sing:

"Blue eye lids,
Baby's got blue eye lids
Like a deep blue sea
On a blue blue day..."

The fact that this bird type has blue eyelids is just one of their many fascinating features.

Cam (my female cardinal pictured below)



discusses many aspects of mourning doves in her book, Words In Our Beak Volume One, which is available in soft-cover format from MagCloud


and in digital format  on Amazon as well as in Apple's iTunes and iBooks store.


But here are a few more facts that Cam might mot have mentioned in her narrative. According to WBF-MICH, Males mourning doves are larger than females and "show more color with a bluish cap" (as seen in the pictures below, which were also taken in my garden).




The female is "graced with an olive gray cap." as seen in the next couple of pictures taken in my garden. She's on the right in the first of the photos and on the left in the other.



Another WBF-MICH Page states that "The Mourning Dove’s common name comes from their mournful cooing song. Their scientific name Zenaida honors Zenaide, Princess of Naples and the wife of Charles-Lucien Bonaparte, who was a naturalist and the nephew of the French emperor, Napoleon Bonaparte."

Their song may be mournful in its sound, but for the most part, mourning doves convey happiness as you might surmise from looking at the next image.


This dove tells me he identifies with Frank Sinatra's Old Blue Eyes, and like yours truly does with Elton John's song re blue eyes, "my" crooning mourning dove changes the song's words to suit his purposes, thus singing the words "Old Blue Eyelids...." whenever he hears the song.

ADDENDUM FALL 2018: 

The digital versions of Volume One within the Words In Our Beak book series that are mentioned in this entry may only remain available for a limited time, but hardcover versions of Volume One, Two and Three can now be found wherever books are sold. Please click here to go to my blog post that provides details as to where you can get these books.

MY BOOK SERIES

Additionally, I have rendered some images from these books into other formats and they are available via Fine Art America (FAA). Some of my other photographs (Black & White Collection, Kaleidoscopic Images and the famous Mandarin duck who visited NYC) can also be found on my FAA pages.

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