There is a strange grunting sound coming from the woods now. This is the song — if such it can be called — of the least familiar of our doves or pigeons, the stock dove. It is a kind of dull “woor-wick, woor-wick” that I have always thought very tedious, but that the great early 20th-century naturalist W H Hudson perversely considered the most attractive of all the songs of the British doves.
It is difficult to see this bird clearly, since it dashes off quickly through the treetops if you get near. But as it goes you can just make out that it has the shape of a wood pigeon, though slightly smaller, and is a bluish bird without the white bar on the wings that wood pigeons have.
You can see it better when several individuals feed out in the middle of a field, though there, too, it is hard to get near it. Through field glasses you can detect that it has a much gentler eye than the greedy-looking, yellow-ringed eye of the wood pigeon, and an altogether softer, friendlier look about it. When it flies up, you see that its wings are framed in black.
Our four members of this family are the wood pigeon (or ring dove), the rock dove (with the town pigeons that are mostly descended from it), the collared dove (since it first arrived here from the Balkans in 1955) and the turtle dove. The turtle dove is the only one of these that is as reticent as the stock dove. The collared dove is particularly bold and noisy and has become a common garden bird.
Not everybody likes the squawk that collared doves make when they land, or their “coo-coo-coo” song that sometimes leads to them being mistaken for a cuckoo, even though these are cheerful sounds.The turtle dove, which is now becoming rare, purrs gently in tall hedges, and has rich tortoiseshell-like plumage; but some people feel a particular tendresse for the shy, elusive stock dove — in spite of its dreadful song.