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. When a perched dove is attacked or touched by a player, it 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 Scout or Medic is killed, appearing to come from the corpse or gibs.

There are 78 perched doves 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, clicking on one of the three doves "perched" at the top of the page leads to three different pictures, each with different connotations to the Medic: a dilapidated hospital, a waiting room, and a doctor's office, respectively, and all of which appear empty and abandoned.

Furthermore, forum-going players have witnessed these same white birds flying from the corpse of a Scout when one is killed in the game. No other classes appear to spawn flying birds from their corpses upon death.

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