Mourning dove
The mourning dove is a member of the dove family, Columbidae. The bird is also known as the American mourning dove, the rain dove, the chueybird, and colloquially as the turtle dove, and it was once known as the Carolina pigeon and Carolina turtledove. It is one of the most abundant and widespread North American birds and a popular gamebird, with more than 20 million birds shot annually in the U.S., both for sport and meat. Its ability to sustain its population under such pressure is due to its prolific breeding; in warm areas, one pair may raise up to six broods of two young each in a single year. The wings make an unusual whistling sound upon take-off and landing, a form of sonation. The bird is a strong flier, capable of speeds up to.
Mourning doves are light gray and brown and generally muted in color. Males and females are similar in appearance. The species is generally monogamous, with two squabs per brood. Both parents incubate and care for the young. Mourning doves eat almost exclusively seeds, but the young are fed crop milk by their parents.
Taxonomy
In 1731, the English naturalist Mark Catesby described and illustrated the passenger pigeon and the mourning dove on successive pages of his The Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands. For the passenger pigeon, he used the common name "Pigeon of passage" and the scientific Latin Palumbus migratorius; for the mourning dove he used "Turtle of Carolina" and Turtur carolinensis. In 1743, the naturalist George Edwards included the mourning dove with the English name "long-tail'd dove" and the Latin name Columba macroura in his A Natural History of Uncommon Birds. Edwards's pictures of the male and female doves were drawn from live birds that had been shipped to England from the West Indies. In 1758, when the Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus updated his Systema Naturae for the tenth edition, he conflated the two species. He used the Latin name Columba macroura introduced by Edwards as the binomial name, but included a description mainly based on Catesby. He cited Edwards's description of the mourning dove and Catesby's description of the passenger pigeon. Linnaeus updated his Systema Naturae again in 1766 for the twelfth edition. He dropped Columba macroura and instead coined Columba migratoria for the passenger pigeon, Columba cariolensis for the mourning dove, and Columba marginata for Edwards's mourning dove.To resolve the confusion over the binomial names of the two species, Francis Hemming proposed in 1952 that the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature secure the specific name macroura for the mourning dove and migratorius for the passenger pigeon, since this was the intended use by the authors on whose work Linnaeus had based his description. This was accepted by the ICZN, which used its plenary powers to designate the species for the respective names in 1955.
The mourning dove is now placed in the genus Zenaida, introduced in 1838 by the French naturalist Charles Lucien Bonaparte and named after his wife Zénaïde Bonaparte. The specific epithet is from the Ancient Greek makros meaning "long" and -ouros meaning "-tailed".
The mourning dove is closely related to the eared dove and the Socorro dove. Some authorities consider them a superspecies, and the three birds are sometimes classified in the separate genus Zenaidura, but the current classification has them as separate species in the genus Zenaida. In addition, the Socorro dove has at times been considered conspecific with the mourning dove, though several differences in behavior, call, and appearance justify separation as two different species. While the three species do form a subgroup of Zenaida, using a separate genus would interfere with the monophyly of Zenaida by making it paraphyletic.
There are five subspecies:
- Zenaida macroura marginella – Western Canada and Western United States to south central Mexico
- Zenaida macroura carolinensis – Eastern Canada and Eastern United States, Bermuda, Bahama Islands
- Zenaida macroura macroura – Cuba, Hispaniola, Puerto Rico, Jamaica
- Zenaida macroura clarionensis – Clarion Island
- Zenaida macroura turturilla – Costa Rica, west Panama
The mourning dove is sometimes called the "American mourning dove" to distinguish it from the distantly related mourning collared dove of Africa. It was also formerly known as the "Carolina turtledove" and the "Carolina pigeon". The "mourning" part of its common name comes from its doleful call.
The mourning dove was thought to be the passenger pigeon's closest living relative on morphological grounds until genetic analysis showed Patagioenas pigeons are more closely related. The mourning dove was even suggested to belong to the same genus, Ectopistes, and was listed by some authors as E. carolinensis. The passenger pigeon was hunted to extinction in the early 1900s.
Description
The mourning dove is a medium-sized, slender dove approximately in length. Mourning doves weigh, usually closer to. The mourning dove has a wingspan of 37–45 cm. The elliptical wings are broad, and the head is rounded. Its tail is long and tapered. Mourning doves have perching feet, with three toes forward and one reversed. The legs are short and reddish colored. The beak is short and dark, usually a brown-black hue.The plumage is generally light gray-brown above and lighter and pinkish below. The wings have black spotting, and the outer tail feathers are white, contrasting with the black inners. Below the eye is a distinctive crescent-shaped area of dark feathers. The eyes are dark, with light blue skin surrounding them. The adult male has bright purple-pink patches on the neck sides, with light pink coloring reaching the breast. Adult males possess a distinctly bluish-grey colored crown, which females lack. Females are similar in appearance but have more brown coloring overall and are slightly smaller than males. The iridescent feather patches on the neck above the shoulders are nearly absent but can be quite vivid on males. Juvenile birds have a scaly appearance and are generally darker.
Feather colors are generally believed to be relatively static, changing only by small amounts over periods of months. However, a 2011 study argued that since feathers have neither nerves or blood vessels, color changes must be caused by external stimuli. Researchers analyzed how feathers of iridescent mourning doves responded to stimulus changes of adding and evaporating water. As a result, it was discovered that iridescent feather color changed hue, became more chromatic, and increased overall reflectance by almost 50%. Transmission electron microscopy and thin-film models revealed that color is produced by thin-film interference from a single layer of keratin around the edge of feather barbules, under which lies a layer of air and melanosomes. Once the environmental conditions were changed, the most striking morphological difference was a twisting of colored barbules that exposed more of their surface area for reflection, which explains the observed increase in brightness. Overall, the researchers suggest that some plumage colors may be more changeable than previously thought possible.
All five subspecies of the mourning dove look similar and are not easily distinguishable. The nominate subspecies possesses shorter wings and are darker and more buff-colored than the "average" mourning dove. Z. m. carolinensis has longer wings and toes, a shorter beak, and is darker in color. The western subspecies has longer wings, a longer beak, and shorter toes, and is more muted and lighter in color. The Panama mourning dove has shorter wings and legs, a longer beak, and is grayer in color. The Clarion Island subspecies possesses larger feet, a larger beak, and is darker brown in color.
Vocalization
This species' call is a distinctive, plaintive , uttered by males to attract females, and it may be mistaken for the call of an owl at first. During the call, the throat of the dove swells. Close up, a grating or throat-rattling sound may be heard preceding the first coo. Other sounds include a nested call by paired males to attract their female mates to the nest sites, a greeting call by males upon rejoining their mates, and an alarm call by either a male or female when threatened. In flight, the wings make a fluttery whistling sound that is hard to hear. The wing whistle is much louder and more noticeable upon take-off and landing. The mourning dove can also 'clap' its wings together when taking off, in a similar manner to the rock dove.Distribution and habitat
The mourning dove has a large range of nearly. The species is resident throughout the Greater Antilles, most of Mexico, the Continental United States, southern Canada, and the Atlantic archipelago of Bermuda. Much of the Canadian prairie sees these birds in summer only, and southern Central America sees them in winter only. The species is a vagrant in northern Canada, Alaska, and South America. It has been spotted as an accidental at least nine times in the Western Palearctic with records from the British Isles, Sweden, the Azores, and Iceland. In 1963, the mourning dove was introduced to Hawaii, and in 1998 there was a small population in North Kona. The mourning dove also appeared on Socorro Island, off the western coast of Mexico, in 1988, sixteen years after the Socorro dove was extirpated from that island.The mourning dove occupies a wide variety of open and semi-open habitats, such as urban areas, farms, prairie, grassland, and lightly wooded areas. It avoids swamps and thick forest.