Doves

“

Click to listen

— The Engineer shooing away a dove.

”

Doves appear in all Valve-made maps, with the exception of Arena maps, Target and Item Test.

There are two types of doves, perched and flying. The perched doves do not move, blink, or fly; they remain perfectly stationary unless attacked or touched by a player, when they will explode. The explosion causes no damage or knockback. Doves that have exploded will re-appear at the beginning of a new round. Flying doves appear when a Medic or Scout is killed, appearing to come from gibs.

There are 78 perched doves in total.

On June 17, 2011, the Team Fortress website was updated with pictures of doves and dove droppings across the top of the main page. Additionally, clicking on one of the three doves "perched" at the top of the page lead to three different pictures, each with different connotations to the Medic: a bombed, ruined hospital, a waiting room, and a doctor's office, respectively, and all of which appeared empty and abandoned.

On June 20th, 2011, the doves on the main page of the Blog were removed due to the redesign of the Team Fortress website.

Locations

See Dove locations for a listing of all dove sightings.

Update history

June 8, 2011 Patch

[Undocumented] Doves have been added to all Valve-made maps.

June 10, 2011 Patch

Fixed a problem related to spawning multiple entities unnecessarily between mini-rounds.

June 17, 2011 Patch

Fixed a server crash triggered during entity cleanup.
[Undocumented] Added a new "Dove" model with flight animations.

Bugs

There is a dove near the center of Well on a rafter that cannot be killed through conventional methods, as it is inside of a clip brush that blocks all weapons fire or entry. This dove can only be killed by sticky jumping and hitting it with the Ullapool Caber or through the use of noclip. None of the other doves have this problem.

Trivia

Doves can be seen in a teaser image of Meet the Medic,^[1] and the final panel of Meet the Director.^[2]
It is believed the Doves roosting atop the old Team Fortress 2 blog design caused the blog re-design by ruining the old one after it became covered in bird feces.