Bad Crowd

This mourning dove has fallen in with a bad crowd! Not that there's really anything wrong with starlings - or as we call them "European starlings." But they are considered an invasive species and so, like their compatriots, the house sparrows, we aren't supposed to like them. Personally, I think they've been here long enough so that we should consider them to belong here now. But I don't decide these things. It all seems to not matter all that much until you end up volunteering somewhere like The Wildlife Center of Virginia, and then you learn that all we are allowed to do with starlings and house sparrows when people bring them in, be they injured adults or orphaned nestlings or something in between, is euthanize them. It's the law. Seems a bit unfair to me.

The starling that has its back to us looks like a juvenile, the rest I can't be entirely sure about.