Doves

Doves and pigeons are the birds that everyone recognizes and almost nobody respects. They coo from power lines. They strut through parking lots. They explode out of brush piles when you're walking through a field and scare the soul out of your body with the whistling sound of their wings. They're so common, so familiar, and so deeply embedded in the human-modified landscape that most people have stopped thinking of them as wildlife at all — they're just part of the scenery, like squirrels or mailboxes.

That's a mistake. The dove and pigeon family (Columbidae) is one of the most ecologically interesting, culturally significant, and historically dramatic bird families on the planet. Rock pigeons have been partnered with humans for over 5,000 years — longer than most dog breeds. Mourning doves are the most heavily hunted bird in North America, with an annual harvest exceeding 20 million.

Eurasian collared-doves pulled off one of the fastest range expansions in modern ornithological history, colonizing an entire continent in about 30 years. And the passenger pigeon — once the most abundant bird in North America, with flocks that darkened the sky for days — went from billions to zero in less than a century. Doves and pigeons are not boring. We've just been looking at them wrong.

Doves vs. Pigeons: There Is No Difference

Here's a fact that surprises people: there is no taxonomic distinction between doves and pigeons. They're all Columbidae. The common names are arbitrary and inconsistent — larger species tend to be called "pigeons" and smaller ones "doves," but the cutoff is cultural, not biological. A rock pigeon and a mourning dove are as closely related as two species in the same family can be, and calling one a "pigeon" and the other a "dove" is a human invention based on nothing more than size and vibes.

All Columbidae share key traits: plump bodies, small heads, short bills with a fleshy cere at the base, strong flight muscles, and the ability to produce "crop milk" — a protein-rich secretion from the lining of the crop that both parents use to feed their young. Crop milk is unique to pigeons and doves (and flamingos, weirdly) and allows them to raise chicks without depending on an insect food supply, which is one reason they can breed in almost any season and almost any habitat.

They also share the cooing vocalization that defines the family. Every dove and pigeon coos, and the coo is produced by a specialized vocal organ called the syrinx. The cooing repertoire varies by species — mourning doves have their mournful "oo-ah-coo-coo-coo," Eurasian collared-doves have their repetitive three-note "coo-COO-coo," and rock pigeons have their guttural, burbling coo — but the basic mechanism is the same across the family.

The North Louisiana Lineup

North Louisiana hosts five regular dove and pigeon species, spanning the range from deeply native to recently invaded to fully domesticated-gone-feral. Mourning doves are the natives — the original, the most abundant, and the most hunted. They've been here since before humans arrived and they'll be here long after we've stopped arguing about them.