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Laughing Dove | Spilopelia senegalensis
Palmtortel | Tórtola senegalesa
The Laughing Dove is an African dove that has lived in Perth for more than a century: small, warm pinkish-brown, with a chequered rufous-and-black patch down the side of the neck instead of a collar, and a rolling chuckle that gave it its English name. You see it on the pavement, at the chook run, on the park lawn — almost never out in the bush.
Voice
A low rolling chuckle: croo-doo-doo-doo-doo, rising in loudness and then falling away again. It is exactly that undulating, half-swallowed laugh that gave the species its English name. It calls all year, from a roof edge, a wire or a low branch, and in a suburban street several birds often answer one another at once.
Recording: African Bioacoustics Community — CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 · City of Cape Town (near Cape Town), City of Cape Town Metropolitan Municipality, Western Cape, South Africa · xeno-canto
Identification
A small, compact dove of 25 to 27 centimetres and about 100 grams. Head, neck and breast are pinkish-brown with a lilac wash; down the side of the lower neck runs a chequered band of split rufous and black feathers — not a continuous collar but a blocked patch. The wing shows a blue-grey panel, the belly is whitish, the tail is long and graduated with white tips to the outer feathers, and the legs are red. The eye is dark brown. The sexes are alike; juveniles lack the neck patch but already show the grey wing.
Confusion species
Spotted Dove (Spilopelia chinensis), also introduced, is bigger and darker and has a black nape patch spotted with white, plus a yellow to pinkish-white eye. African Collared Dove (Streptopelia roseogrisea) is paler, creamy, with a narrow clean black half-collar and a red eye. The neck pattern settles all three at a glance: chequered rufous in the Laughing Dove, black spotted white in the Spotted Dove, a plain narrow black bar in the African Collared Dove.
Habitat
Gardens, parks, road verges, school grounds, town squares, chook runs and farm sheds: a bird of built-up country. It barely enters native bush, and in the field that is the practical difference from most native doves. It feeds on the ground on grain and seed, often at spillage along roads and around silos, and drinks regularly.
Where the bird is most often found, arranged by main group and formation.
Range and movements
Within the map window it occurs only in Australia, and there only in the south-west. Birds were released at Perth Zoo in 1898, after importation around 1889, and spread rapidly especially from the 1930s. It is now very common in the suburbs of Perth and in the larger wheatbelt towns, east to about Merredin and south to Bunbury, with scattered birds further out along roads and railways. The eastern states and New Zealand do not have it. Its native range lies in sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East, South Asia and parts of Central Asia.
- Resident
- dark = core range, pale = thinly spread
Where and when to look
In Perth you need not travel for it: any park lawn, car park or school fence will produce one. Look at the side of the neck, not the back of it — that is where it parts from the Spotted Dove. Breeding peaks from September to November; the nest is a flimsy stick platform in a street tree or on a building ledge, with two white eggs that both parents incubate in about sixteen days.
Conservation
Least Concern (LC) worldwide and abundant in its native range. In Australia it is an introduced bird, logged as 'Introduced' in every state. Damage to agriculture is slight; the Western Australian wildlife service notes that turtle-doves there do not appear to compete with native birds for nest sites or food, but they do take feed put out for poultry and aviary birds and foul paving. Eradication in the south-west has long since stopped being an option — the bird is too firmly established — while the other states track down stray birds to head off new colonies.
Scientific name
Spilopelia senegalensis | (Linnaeus, 1766)
Linnaeus described the bird in 1766 as Columba senegalensis; the move to another genus puts author and year in parentheses. The epithet points to Senegal, where the type came from. The genus Spilopelia was introduced by Sundevall in 1873, from Greek spilos, 'spot', and peleia, 'dove' — for the chequered neck patch; a molecular study in 2001 showed Streptopelia to be paraphyletic, after which this name came back into use. The Dutch name palmtortel, 'palm turtle-dove', is usually explained by the species' fondness for palms and oases in Africa and the Middle East.