Doves

“

Click to listen

— The Engineer shooing away a bird

”

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

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

There are 78 perched birds in total.

As of Friday, June 17, 2011, the Team Fortress website has been updated with pictures of doves and dove droppings across the top of the main page. Additionally, upon clicking on one of the three doves "perched" at the top of the page, you are taken to three different pictures, each with different connotations to the Medic: a dilapidated hospital, a waiting room, and a doctor's office, respectively.

Locations

See Bird locations for a listing of all bird sightings.

Update history

June 8, 2011 Patch

[Undocumented] Birds 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 bird near the center of Well on a rafter that seemingly cannot be killed, as it is inside of a clip brush that blocks all weapons fire or entry. None of the other birds have this problem. This bird can only be killed through the use of noclip or sticky jumping and hitting it with the Ullapool Caber.

Trivia

Birds can be seen in a teaser image of Meet the Medic,^[1] and the final panel of Meet the Director.^[2]
On June 17th, 2011 birds were added to the TF2 Official Blog, linking to 3 images.