Perhaps you can tell me what killed the dove in what I described earlier, with many, many dove being lethargic, then dead in a 12 hour period where there was a temperature change from the 60's to minus 15?
Dunno.
Mourning doves overwinter as far as South Dakota and Montana.
In Cardinals, they have figured out that the coldest a cardinal can survive the night is about -40 F and that the northern edge of their range is determined by this, how much they can eat in relation to temperature, too cold and they cannot eat enough in the days to survive the nights, cardinals being a southern species spread north in the last 100 years and not found nearly so far north as is the mourning dove.
Once in October we had thousands of dead barn swallows in piles around a local lake after an early cold front, these swallows had come down with the front, presumably starving the whole time, and were in deep distress when they got here, foraging low over the shallows looking for insects and allowing us to walk right up to them.
Maybe those doves had come down with the front too, were there NO doves anywhere for days or weeks after that?
First thing I woulda done with the fresh carcasses is feel for the breastbone, it will stick way out on a bird that metabolised itself to death, the body fat first and then the flight muscles, leaving the bird too weak to fly near the end (I would say "starved to death" but it happens so quick its hard to think of it in those terms.)
Otherwise, is there some sort of temperature shock that can set in after a eighty degree drop in temperature? I dunno.
Birdwatcher
