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Mourning Dove | Zenaida macroura
Treurduif | Paloma huilota
The Mourning Dove is a slim, sandy dove with a long pointed tail, one of the commonest birds of North America. In the Caribbean it is confined to the Bahamas, the Turks and Caicos Islands and the Greater Antilles, where it lives mainly in open, dry and built-up country. In Cuba it is called rabiche, after its long tail. Its plaintive call gave the species its name.
Voice
A soft, plaintive cooing that carries far: oo-OO-oo, oo, oo, oo, with a rising second syllable and three low, even notes. From a distance it sounds almost like an owl. On take-off the wings make a high whistling sound.
Recording: Stanislas Wroza — CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 · converted to mono · xeno-canto
Identification
23–34 cm, the wide range largely due to the length of the tail. A slender dove with a small head and a long wedge-shaped tail with white tips to the outer feathers. The upperparts are grey-brown to sandy, with a few large black spots on the wing coverts. The underparts are paler, pinkish-buff on the breast. Below the eye is a small black spot; the sides of the neck show a purplish-pink sheen. The legs are red, the eye dark with a narrow blue eye-ring. The male has a blue-grey crown and a pinker breast, the female is browner. The wings whistle on take-off.
Confusion species
Zenaida Dove Zenaida aurita is stockier and warmer brown, with a shorter, rounded tail and a narrow white trailing edge to the secondaries. White-winged Dove Zenaida asiatica is bulkier, with a square tail and a broad white wing band. Eurasian Collared Dove Streptopelia decaocto is paler and larger, with a black neck collar and a rounded tail. The small ground doves, such as Common Ground Dove Columbina passerina, have a short tail and rufous wings in flight.
Habitat
Open country: fields, pastures and farmland mosaic, savanna, dry scrub and open woodland, as well as roadsides, gardens and village edges. It picks seeds from the ground, often in pairs or small groups, and drinks regularly; outside the breeding season it joins other doves in fields and at water. The nest is a thin platform of twigs in a tree, shrub or palm, sometimes on the ground.
Where the bird is most at home, classified by the vegetation types of the Caribbean.
Range and movements
Common in the Bahamas, the Turks and Caicos Islands, Cuba with the Isla de la Juventud, Hispaniola (Haiti and the Dominican Republic) and Puerto Rico; more local on Jamaica. From the Cayman Islands, the Virgin Islands and the Lesser Antilles only a few isolated records are known. Beyond the region from southern Canada through the United States and Mexico to Central America; northern birds move south in winter.
- Resident
- dark = core range, pale = thinly spread
How and when to look
On Cuba and Hispaniola seen everywhere on power lines along roads through farmland, and in Puerto Rico on the dry south-western coastal plain. The wing whistle on take-off and the pointed white-tipped tail are the best features in flight.
Conservation status
Not threatened globally and one of the most numerous birds of North America. In the Caribbean common in the Greater Antilles and the Bahamas, where it is an important game bird. The species benefits from the opening up of the landscape for crops and livestock.
Scientific name
Zenaida macroura | (Linnaeus, 1758)
Linnaeus described the species in 1758 as Columba macroura; because it was later moved to another genus, the author and year stand in brackets. The genus Zenaida was introduced in 1838 by Bonaparte. Zenaida honours Zénaïde Bonaparte (1801–1854), wife of the French ornithologist Charles Lucien Bonaparte, who named the genus in 1838. macroura is Greek, from makros 'long' and oura 'tail', after the long, pointed tail. The specimen the first description was based on came from West Indies (Linnaeus's 'Canada' is an error).