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Zenaida Dove | Zenaida aurita
Antilliaanse treurduif | Paloma aurita
The Zenaida Dove is the typical dove of the West Indian coast: a stocky, warm brown dove found on almost every island from the Bahamas to Grenada, on hotel lawns and in gardens as readily as in coastal scrub. Away from the islands it lives only along the coast of the Yucatán Peninsula. It is the national bird of Anguilla.
Voice
A soft, plaintive coo-OO-oo, oo, oo, very like the call of Mourning Dove but faster and often one note shorter. Heard mainly in the morning. The wings clap on take-off.
Recording: Garrett Yocklin — CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 · converted to mono · xeno-canto
Identification
25–28 cm, stocky, with a fairly short, rounded tail. The upperparts are warm brown, with a few black spots on the wing coverts and a narrow white trailing edge to the secondaries, visible in flight and often on the closed wing too. Head and underparts are pinkish-cinnamon. Two small black streaks below the eye and on the ear coverts; the sides of the neck show a purple-gold sheen. The tail is grey with a black band and pale grey tips. The legs are red. The female is duller than the male.
Confusion species
Mourning Dove Zenaida macroura is slimmer and paler, with a long pointed tail and no white wing edge. White-winged Dove Zenaida asiatica has a broad white wing band, a square tail with white corners and a blue bare eye-ring. In the southern Lesser Antilles Eared Dove Zenaida auriculata is smaller, greyer on the crown, and lacks the white trailing edge to the wing. Caribbean Dove Leptotila jamaicensis has a white face and white belly and walks mainly in woodland.
Habitat
Open and semi-open lowland country: coastal scrub and coastal woodland, dry forest, cactus scrub, mangrove edges, and also fields, plantations, gardens, parks and hotel grounds. It takes seeds and fallen fruit from the ground, often on paths and lawns. The nest is a thin platform of twigs in a tree or shrub, sometimes on the ground or in a rock crevice.
Where the bird is most at home, classified by the vegetation types of the Caribbean.
Range and movements
Widespread and usually common in the Bahamas and the Turks and Caicos Islands, Cuba, the Cayman Islands, Jamaica, Hispaniola (Haiti and the Dominican Republic), Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands, and throughout the Lesser Antilles from Anguilla and Saint Martin to Grenada and Barbados. It is absent from the ABC Islands, Trinidad and Tobago and San Andrés. The subspecies Zenaida aurita zenaida lives in the Greater Antilles, Z. a. aurita in the Lesser Antilles. Beyond the islands only along the north coast of the Yucatán Peninsula and on Cozumel, as Z. a. salvadorii.
- Resident
- dark = core range, pale = thinly spread
How and when to look
On almost every island it occurs on hotel lawns and in gardens, where the birds are often tame. On Cuba and Hispaniola it is more common in dry coastal country than inland. As it flies off, the white wing edge and pale tail tips show well.
Conservation status
Not threatened globally. Common over most of the region, and hunted on several islands. In the Cayman Islands, according to the local conservation department, it has become less common through habitat loss and competition from White-winged Dove.
Scientific name
Zenaida aurita | (Temminck, 1809)
Temminck described the species in 1809 as Columba Aurita; 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. aurita is Latin for 'eared', after the dark spot on the ear-coverts. The specimen the first description was based on came from Martinique.