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Eurasian Collared-Dove | Streptopelia decaocto

Turkse Tortel | Tórtola turca

In forty years the Eurasian Collared-Dove has gone from a handful of escaped birds in the Bahamas to a common sight across almost all of North America. It is a pale, sandy-grey dove with a narrow black half-collar, at home in small towns, farmyards and around grain silos. From Florida to southern Alaska it followed human settlement, and nowhere faster than across the Great Plains.

Eurasian Collared-Dove (Streptopelia decaocto) — Photo: Andreas Trepte — CC BY-SA 2.5 · Wikimedia Commons

Voice

The song is a three-syllable coo, coo-COOO-cuk, the middle syllable longest and loudest, repeated on and on from a roof edge, an aerial or a wire. It is flatter and drier than the mournful cooing of Mourning Dove and carries through the whole day, in the midday heat and late into autumn. On landing it gives a harsh, nasal hwaah that hardly sounds like a dove at all. In display flight the male claps its wings audibly, climbs steeply and then glides down with the tail spread.

Listen: SongXC1062731

Recording: Lionel Triboulin — CC0 · Arrondissement de Rouen (near Le Mesnil-Esnard), Seine-Maritime, Normandie, France · xeno-canto

Identification

A large, slim dove of nearly thirty centimetres, plain light grey to sandy buff, with a narrow black half-collar edged white across the nape. The tail is square-cut, black at the base below and broadly white at the tip, which shows well as the bird takes off and lands. The primaries are clearly darker than the rest of the wing, both in flight and at rest. The eye is red-brown with a narrow ring of bare skin, the bill dark, the legs reddish; male and female look alike. Juveniles have no collar yet and are faintly scaled on the wing coverts.

Confusion species

Mourning Dove is smaller, warmer brown and has a long, tapering tail edged in white and black spots on the wing, and lacks the collar. Spotted Dove, in Hawaii and locally in the south, is darker and carries a broad black neck patch spotted with white rather than a thin band. Rock Pigeon is shorter-tailed and heavier built and shows black wingbars and a pale rump. Harder is the escaped African Collared-Dove (Streptopelia roseogrisea): it is smaller, creamier in tone and white rather than dark at the base of the undertail.

Habitat

It seeks out settlement: village centres, suburbs, farmyards, feed stores, grain handling sites and garden feeders. What it needs is a tree or a building to nest in and open ground with spilled grain or seed to forage on. It passes over closed forest and treeless plains, and in the cold interior of Canada it stays close to inhabited places. In the southwest it also works its way into dry scrub around hamlets and along roadsides.

Where the bird is most often found, arranged by the USNVC — the vegetation classification of the United States and Canada — and CMECS for sea and coast.

Range and movements

The North American story begins in 1974, when a burglary at a pet shop on New Providence in the Bahamas set several dozen birds loose. They reached Florida around 1980 and bred there in 1982; the species then pushed west and north at more than thirteen per cent growth a year. By about 2010 it was in southern Alaska, faster than House Sparrow or European Starling managed in the nineteenth century. It is now resident across nearly all of the United States, southern Canada, northern Mexico and the West Indies; only the northeastern United States and the cold Canadian interior remain largely empty.

Resident
Breeding (summer)
Winter
Passage
dark = core range, pale = thinly spread

The map is a density field, not a drawn range boundary: it is built from the records themselves and therefore does not follow state or national borders. Both the seasonal colour and the depth of colour come, cell by cell, from the records of GBIF (2006–2026), counted per 0,7° cell and divided by all bird records in that same cell, so that the density of birdwatchers does not count. Every cell is counted separately for June–July, December–January and the migration months, and takes the colour of the season that wins there; a cell is only called summer or winter where the other season is nearly empty. Country outlines: Natural Earth (public domain).

Where and when to look

Look for it where grain is handled: at silos, feed stores and farmyards, doves often sit by the dozen on roofs and wires. Listen for the flat three-syllable coo, heard all year and unlike anything the native doves say. On a passing dove, check the tail: square-cut with a broad white tip means Eurasian Collared-Dove, pointed with white edges means Mourning Dove.

Conservation

Partners in Flight puts the world population at about 85 million birds, and numbers in North America are still rising. In several states it may be hunted as a non-native bird, often with no daily bag limit. Work in Florida covering 1999 to 2008 found no sign that numbers of native doves suffered, but that has only been tested in the subtropical south.

Scientific name

Streptopelia decaocto | (Frivaldszky, 1838)

Frivaldszky described the species in 1838 as Columba decaocto, from a bird taken in Turkey; Bonaparte placed the turtle-doves in the genus Streptopelia in 1855, which is why author and year stand in parentheses. Streptopelia is built from Greek streptos, 'necklace', and peleia, 'dove', after the band on the neck. The species name decaocto is Greek for 'eighteen': in a Greek tale a servant girl complains that she earned only eighteen coins a year, and that number is heard in the three-part coo. The type locality is Turkey.