Doves

Overview

Doves are kept in dovecotes across the farmed river country of the cradle-web for their young, their eggs, and their dung. Keeping them is a privilege. In most of the Confluence Basins and the towns of the Lower Serath and the Headwater Marches, only a lord, a town, or a house that holds the right may build a dovecote, because the birds feed on everyone's fields, and a commoner who builds one has started a quarrel.

Appearance

A dove is plump and soft-feathered, about the size of a small hen's head and neck together, with a small head, a short bill, and pink legs. The common dovecote bird is blue-grey, with two dark bars across each wing, a white rump that flashes in flight, and a sheen of green and purple at the neck. Some lines are white, pied, or brown. Doves clatter their wings on take-off and fly fast and straight; at rest they murmur and coo, a soft, rolling sound that fills a dovecote like water in a pipe. A dovecote smells of dust and dung.

Habitat and Range

Wild doves nest on cliffs and in old towers; kept doves live in dovecotes: round or square stone towers lined inside with hundreds of nesting holes, standing near a manor, a town wall, or a mill. They fly out each day to feed on the fields and stubble within reach and come home at dusk.

Behaviour and Temperament

Doves feed in flocks on the ground, on spilt and sown grain, weed seed, and green shoots, and a flock on a newly sown field can strip it. They are gentle with people, quick to startle, and faithful to their cote: a dove carried far away will fly home, which some courier houses use.

Life Cycle

A pair lays two white eggs at a time and may raise five or six broods in a year. Both parents feed the young on a milk of their own crop. The young are taken for the table at about four weeks, just before they fly. A dove may live ten years.

Uses and Dangers

The young, called squabs, are a summer delicacy on a lord's table and a gift between houses. The dung, scraped from the cote floor each year, is the richest manure the basins know, worth more by the cartload than any other, and goes on gardens and the best fields. Against that, the cote's birds feed on the tenants' grain, and complaints against a lord's doves are among the commonest grumbles in the basins, and among the least often won.

Lore and Belief

A dovecote is a boast of rank as plain as a wall, and a family the lord lets build one builds it where the road can see it. Doves are birds of peace and of marriage in Human villages, released at weddings and at the swearing of a settlement. Farmers say a dove that will not go home has smelt a death in its cote.

Where It Appears

• Overview: Animals