How to Attract Doves, and What to Do When Pigeons Arrive Instead

How to attract doves is a question about height rather than about food. These are ground foragers, so a tube feeder with perches is close to invisible to them and a tray near the soil is not.

The complication is that everything which suits a dove also suits a pigeon, and the two birds sitting side by side under your feeder have opposite legal standing in the United States. One is on the federal list of protected migratory birds. The other is not on it at all.

How to attract doves: feed low and flat

The feeder shape does most of the work, and Project FeederWatch is specific about which shape reaches them.

On trays: Trays attract most species of feeder birds. Placed near the ground, they are most likely to attract juncos, doves, and sparrows. Height is the variable in that sentence. The same tray six feet up on a pole is a different feeder to a dove.

Hoppers work if they are big enough to stand on: Large hoppers attract most species of feeder birds and will allow larger species, like doves and grackles to feed.

What will not work is the feeder most people already own. A tube with short perches is built to exclude exactly this size of bird, which is the whole point of the design and is covered in what each feeder type decides.

A platform feeder for doves therefore means a low one, and the tradeoff is that low platforms are the arrangement most likely to bring everything else too, from squirrels to rats. Keeping the ground clear underneath matters more here than anywhere else on this site, for reasons set out in what accumulates under a feeder.

Bird seed for doves

Cheap grain, and this is one of the few cases where the cheap fraction of a mixed bag is the right answer rather than filler.

FeederWatch on cracked corn: Whole corn is a favorite of Wild Turkeys and ducks, while cracked corn will attract doves, quail, and sparrows. And the practical instruction: To attract these birds, try mixing cracked corn with millet and feeding a scoopful on the ground or a platform feeder.

Millet does the same job: Millet is a favored food of many smaller, ground foraging birds, and A handful of millet sprinkled on the ground will keep your juncos and sparrows happy.

Both sources chose small words: scoopful and handful. Both instructions are about small quantities put out deliberately, which is the opposite of what happens when millet and cracked corn arrive as the bulk of a cheap mixed bag nobody chose. The difference between those two situations is the subject of what filler is doing in the cheapest bags.

My bird feeder is attracting pigeons

Same problem, same mechanism, and it is written up elsewhere on this site rather than repeated here.

A pigeon is a large ground-feeding flock bird, so everything that reduces grackles reduces pigeons: take up the tray, stop scattering seed, clear what falls, and narrow the perches on whatever remains. The full version, including why the ground matters more than the feeder, is in what to do about a flock of grackles.

Two things are different enough to be worth saying here.

The setting is usually urban. Pigeons at a feeder are disproportionately a balcony and city problem, where there is no ground to clear and no room to move the feeder. That situation has its own constraints, in feeding birds on a balcony, including a city ordinance that permits pigeon feeding only under a condition a balcony meets by default.

And you cannot solve it by feeding doves instead. The seed that brings doves is the seed that brings pigeons, and no published feeder design separates two birds of that size and posture. If pigeons are the problem, the dove half of this article is not available to you.

The two birds are not equal under federal law

The difference is checkable in the regulation itself.

The federal list of protected migratory birds is 50 CFR 10.13. We searched the current text of that list for each species by both common and scientific name:

The bottom two rows are there because they match what this site has said elsewhere, from a different source, about which birds at a nest box are protected. The regulation and the NestWatch guidance agree.

So the mourning dove walking under your feeder is federally protected, and the pigeon next to it is not. The US Fish and Wildlife Service states the first half plainly: Mourning doves and other migratory birds are a national resource protected under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act.

Feeding doves can create a baited area, but only where hunting happens

Doves are hunted, and that turns scattered seed into a regulated object under certain conditions.

FWS: The mourning dove is the most hunted migratory game bird in North America, and dove hunting is a popular sport in many parts of this country.

Federal hunting regulations define a baited area broadly. From 50 CFR 20.11: Baited area means any area on which salt, grain, or other feed has been placed, exposed, deposited, distributed, or scattered, if that salt, grain, or other feed could serve as a lure or attraction for migratory game birds to, on, or over areas where hunters are attempting to take them.

Read the last clause before you worry. The definition turns on areas where hunters are attempting to take them. A feeder in a suburban yard with no hunting anywhere near it is not a baited area, and this rule is not a restriction on feeding birds. It is a restriction on hunting over feed.

Where it becomes real is on rural property that is hunted, or beside land that is, and the number to know is ten days. The regulation: Any such area will remain a baited area for ten days following the complete removal of all such salt, grain, or other feed. FWS puts the same rule in plainer words: A baited area remains off limits to hunting for 10 days after all salt, grain, or other feed has been completely removed.

The prohibition itself falls on the hunter rather than the person with the feeder, and it applies whether or not they knew: By the aid of baiting, or on or over any baited area, where a person knows or reasonably should know that the area is or has been baited.

What this means in practice. If your land is hunted for dove, or you let others hunt it, the feeder needs to be empty and the ground clear for ten days before the season opens near it. If nobody hunts anywhere near you, this is a piece of context rather than a rule you are subject to. We are describing what the regulation says and are not giving legal advice; state rules run alongside the federal ones, and FWS notes that A violation of a State migratory game bird regulation is also a violation of Federal regulations.

Questions people ask

How do I attract doves to my yard? Feed low and flat. A tray near the ground or a large hopper, with cracked corn and millet, reaches them. A tube feeder with short perches does not.

How do I attract mourning doves specifically? The same arrangement. Mourning Doves are the common backyard dove across most of the United States and are ground foragers like the rest of the family.

What is the best bird seed for doves? Cracked corn and millet, per FeederWatch, offered as a scoopful on the ground or on a platform feeder.

Do doves use hanging feeders? Rarely. They will use a large hopper with room to stand, but perch-based tube feeders are designed to exclude birds of this size.

Is there a bird feeder that keeps pigeons away? Not by design. A bird feeder that keeps pigeons away is one they cannot stand on, which means short perches, and those exclude doves and cardinals as well.

My bird feeder is attracting pigeons. What now? Remove the tray, stop ground feeding, and clear the spill. It is the same set of actions that reduces a grackle flock, and it will cost you the doves as well.

Is it legal to feed doves? Feeding is not the regulated activity. Hunting over an area where feed has been placed is, and an area stays classified as baited for ten days after the feed is gone.

Are pigeons protected? Rock Pigeons do not appear on the federal list of migratory birds at 50 CFR 10.13. Mourning Doves do. Local ordinances are separate and sometimes address pigeon feeding directly.

How to attract doves: the short version

How to attract doves comes down to putting food where a walking bird can reach it. A low tray, a large hopper, a scoopful of cracked corn and millet, and patience with the fact that this is the least selective arrangement in bird feeding.

That lack of selectivity is the whole difficulty. The same low tray brings pigeons, and no feeder design tells the two apart, so a yard with a pigeon problem cannot also be a yard that feeds doves.

The asymmetry underneath is what lasts. Two gray birds of similar size walk under the same feeder, and one of them is on a federal list that the other has never been on. If you ever need to act on one of them, that list is the first thing to check, and it is one search away in the regulation itself. How to attract doves is easy; keeping the answer from also attracting pigeons is the part nobody can promise.

This article contains no affiliate links and is not legal advice. The federal regulations are linked and quoted so the current text can be read directly. Nothing here is a first-hand sighting: every claim about dove behavior is attributed to the source that published it.