All species › Pigeons and doves
Pigeons and doves | Columbiformes
Duifachtigen | Palomas y tórtolas
Compactly built birds with a small head, short neck, short legs and a slender bill whose base is soft and covered by a swollen cere in which the nostrils lie. They drink with the bill in the water and the head down, in a single sucking draught, which sets them apart from nearly all other land birds. The diet is almost wholly plant matter — seeds, fruit and buds — stored in a roomy two-lobed crop and ground in a thick-walled gizzard; the wall of that same crop yields, in the breeding season and in both parents, a protein-rich pap. The breast muscles are heavy and the wings fairly short and pointed, built for a fast take-off and a straight escape flight. The feathers sit loosely in the skin and come away in handfuls at the slightest grip, leaving an attacker with down.
Families in this order
- Pigeons and doves | Columbidae17 speciesThe family here runs from small woodland doves with metallic spots on the wing and long-tailed desert species to stout rock and mountain pigeons and green fruit pigeons that clamber about in figs, hanging head-down at the clusters. The nest is a loose, often see-through platter of twigs in a shrub, on a ledge or in a fork, holding almost always two white eggs; both parents incubate and feed the young on crop milk alone for the first days, so breeding also goes on outside the rains and clutches follow one another closely. The call is a muffled cooing made with the bill shut and the throat inflated, each species in a fixed rhythm: a steady three-part motif, a series that accelerates and falls away in pitch, or a short phrase hammered out over and over. Many species have a display flight in which the bird climbs steeply with clapping wings and then glides down on raised wings with the tail spread. Seed-eating species feed on the ground and gather in flocks at drinking places; the fruit pigeons stay in the canopy and move with the fruiting.