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Eurasian Collared Dove
Backstory: someone posted a picture of two exotic doves on the back porch of their Bozeman Montana home in ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
birdlovers. The reply came: those are not feral birds, those are escaped pets. I tended to agree (thankfully, not in print, until now). Bozeman is nice (in the summer), but settling there strikes me as an eccentric decision, for a bird or for David Quammen.
...
The Eurasian Collared Dove is a bird originally native to India or thereabouts, that has been semi-domesticated for hundreds of years. People keep them as caged pets, or sometimes uncaged pets, which is why they didn't stay just in India very long (once people started moving around and selling caged birds to one another). If you read North American bird guides, they'll tell you that a feral population in the Bahamas has spread to Florida, so they are listed in the "exotics" parts of the guides.
However, if you look at current data:
Holy cow. This is from the Great Backyard Bird Count. Not only could you see them in Bozeman, but apparently also in Seattle, Denver, and even Calgary. Well, that shows the importance of citizen science. Not that the current range of the Eurasian collard dove is the most critical thing to know, but since they only update field guides about once per generation, this is pretty dramatic. I wonder if the ec dove found a niche in the vacancy left by the passenger pigeon, or if it's just taking advantage of human changes to the landscape. And what does it have against the Northeast?
birdlovers. The reply came: those are not feral birds, those are escaped pets. I tended to agree (thankfully, not in print, until now). Bozeman is nice (in the summer), but settling there strikes me as an eccentric decision, for a bird or for David Quammen....
The Eurasian Collared Dove is a bird originally native to India or thereabouts, that has been semi-domesticated for hundreds of years. People keep them as caged pets, or sometimes uncaged pets, which is why they didn't stay just in India very long (once people started moving around and selling caged birds to one another). If you read North American bird guides, they'll tell you that a feral population in the Bahamas has spread to Florida, so they are listed in the "exotics" parts of the guides.
However, if you look at current data:
Holy cow. This is from the Great Backyard Bird Count. Not only could you see them in Bozeman, but apparently also in Seattle, Denver, and even Calgary. Well, that shows the importance of citizen science. Not that the current range of the Eurasian collard dove is the most critical thing to know, but since they only update field guides about once per generation, this is pretty dramatic. I wonder if the ec dove found a niche in the vacancy left by the passenger pigeon, or if it's just taking advantage of human changes to the landscape. And what does it have against the Northeast?
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