Subject: [Tweeters] Collared Dove spread
Date: Oct 16 07:38:46 2009
From: Gary Bletsch - garybletsch at yahoo.com


Dear Tweeters,

Those Eurasian Collared Doves puzzled me to no end when I was living in western Saudi Arabia. According to the bird books that covered that region, there should have been African Collared Doves there (north of Jeddah), but not Eurasian Collared Doves. Try as I might, in four years I never did see or hear a single African Collared Dove. Meanwhile, it was always easy to find flocks of Eurasian Collared Doves, sometimes hundreds of them, in both urban and suburban locales. I even found them out in remote wadis sometimes, or drinking at little wells way out in the hinterland.

The matter grew more intriguing when another birder moved into the area for a few months (there are precious few birders in the Middle East, and virtually none among the native population). This British birder had been living by the Persian Gulf coast of Saudi Arabia, and as soon as he got to Yanbu where I lived, immediately ticked African Collared Dove on his life list. I challenged him to show me one. He was not able to do so. It turned out that the Eursasian Collared Doves on the Red Sea coast looked much paler to him than the ones back in the Persian Gulf area, so he had assumed that they were Africans.

The collared doves around Yanbu had every single characteristic needed to separate Eurasian from African, including vocalizations. Whether they are indeed paler than the Eurasian Collared Doves elsewhere in the region, I don't know, but they are definitely Eurasians.

I was left wondering whether the Eurasians had moved in and displaced the Africans, or whether the bird books might have been wrong, or if perhaps there had been some interbreeding. Hybridization might explain why the doves in the west could look paler than the ones in the east.

Oh well, that's a question for others to answer, if anyone ever gets to it, in such an underbirded corner of the world.

Yours truly,

Gary Bletsch ? Near Lyman, Washington (Skagit County), USA ? garybletsch at yahoo.com ? ?