Beautiful dove has collared global expansion

THE nearest village to my house is a small place but it does boast something that is becoming rather scarce in rural Ireland – an old-fashioned working farm with an entrance half way down the street.

And, for as long as I can remember, this farm has had a resident pair of collared doves.

I see them regularly, perched on wires or buildings, and sometimes they settle on the road to pick up grit for their crops or spilt grain. I like these small, slim pigeons (there’s a tendency to use the word ‘dove’ for the smaller members of the family and ‘pigeon’ for the larger ones, but this is not an exact convention). Their plumage is a subtle blend of pale grey and very pale pink with that distinctive black collar at the back of the neck and they make a pleasant, three-syllable cooing sound.

But my house is several kilometres from the village, out in the open countryside, and I had never seen a collared dove in my own garden until a pair started to visit a few weeks ago. They appeared during the cold weather, flying in and landing beneath the bird table where they foraged for spilt scraps. They’re regulars now and I hope they’ll nest here.

Collared doves really like to be around people. In fact, I read somewhere that no nest has ever been found that was more than a kilometre from an inhabited building. They mainly eat grain and seeds so they’re happy around farmyards but they’re equally at home in urban and suburban areas where they commonly visit bird tables. They’ve even made it into the top 20 most widespread Irish garden birds. So the fact that they shunned my garden for so many years made me feel a little discriminated against.

In winter they occasionally form flocks, sometimes mixing with wood pigeons. But they’re most commonly seen in pairs and the pair bond seems to be very strong. Like wood pigeons they perform ritual mating flights in which they fly upwards at a steep angle and then glide back down with their wings held in a v-shape beneath their bodies.

They do this quite a lot because they have several broods a year –- often three or four in Ireland and up to six in warmer countries. Usually two white eggs are laid in a nest which is a platform of twigs in a tree or large bush. These are incubated by the female at night and the male during the day.

The ability to rear a number of broods in a year has helped the collared dove in its remarkable attempt at world domination. In the 19th century the species was restricted to sub-tropical Asia. Then it started to expand in all directions –- including China in the east and Europe to the west. By the 1930s it was in the Balkans and it reached England in 1955, Scotland in 1957 and Ireland in 1959.

Nobody seems to know what triggered this massive expansion, but it’s still going on. It appeared in the Faroe Islands in the 1970s and the number of vagrants turning up in Iceland is increasing. Then somebody seems to have introduced it into the Bahamas from where it hopped across to Florida and started its conquest of mainland America. It’s now found in much of the United States, where it has been declared ‘invasive’ and parts of Canada and Mexico.

In Ireland there are estimated to be 30,000 breeding pairs with some indication that numbers are now declining slightly. When a new species establishes itself its quite common for there to be a population explosion which then levels off as the species stabilises in its new niche.

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