Mourning Doves Are People, Too

In 2020, when I was in lockdown in our condo, I created a one-page comic whenever I was inspired by the doves who started visiting our courtyard and posted it on Instagram. This helped me to keep my sanity, but I didn’t think these comic pages would become a book someday. They were my comic journals, that is, they were random and personal.

But learning more about doves changed my mind.

According to Wikipedia, mourning doves are one of the most abundant and widespread of all North American birds. They are also “…a popular gamebird, with more than 20 million birds (up to 70 million in some years) shot annually in the U.S. for sport and meat. Its ability to sustain its population under such pressure is due to its prolific breeding…”

When I read this description, it was oddly familiar to me. I remembered another bird I had looked up previously. They were passenger pigeons.

I heard about passenger pigeons for the first time while tabling at my first comic festival in Toronto in 2022. One lady mentioned about passenger pigeons who went extinct one hundred years ago. I was intrigued, so I looked them up.

“Passenger pigeons were once the most abundant bird in North America, numbering around 3-5 billion. They suffered a slow decline between 1800 and 1870, followed by a rapid decline over the next twenty years.

“Several factors contributed to the birds' decline, such as deforestation, which destroyed their habitat, and the shrinking of the breeding populations. However, hunting on a massive scale for many decades eventually killed them all. The last wild bird was shot in 1901, and the last captive bird died in a zoo in 1914.“

When I read this I felt sad and I asked myself, how could we stop something like this from happening again? I couldn’t think of an answer. I felt helpless.

The answer came to me when I connected mourning doves to passenger pigeons.

My answer to protect birds was for us to get to know them personally. I realized that this is what I had experienced firsthand and that I had created comics about them!

Initially, I was curious about the birds visiting my courtyard but was a little afraid of them. They were something unknown. But after some time went by, I started to learn about their personalities. I found myself caring deeply about one of the doves (I call her “OG” in the book). I’ve come to consider them as my neighbors. If they are my neighbors, how can I let them become extinct?

So this is how Mourning Doves Are People, Too came about. I would be thrilled if my experiences inspire you to see them and other birds as your neighbors.