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A Dove Tale (NEW CONCEPTS)
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Chad


In: Ramsbottom
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Does anybody have any idea why the Eurasian Collared Dove has recently become hell bent on global domination?

Up until the sixteen hundreds it contented itself with cooing around the Indian subcontinent, where, presumably, it had exclusively resided for long millennia. It then undertook Phase 1 of its expansion programme: extending its range to cover the Middle East as far west as Turkey and part of the Balkans.

Seemingly content with this, no further expansion was noted until the twentieth century, then bang, off we go again ......

Phase 2 was characterised by a rapid spread, north and west from the Balkans, reaching Hungary by the thirties, Germany by the forties, Norway and England by the fifties and finally Portugal by the seventies.

Having established itself throughout Europe, much of Asia and North Africa, in such numbers, that it has even been blamed for the decline of the House Sparrow in the England, it is now concentrating on Phase 3 of its masterplan......the conquest of North America.
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Chad


In: Ramsbottom
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O.K. I'll grant you there's nothing unique about Phase 3 - it probably, wouldn't have been achievable without human assistance -- they were introduced into the Bahamas in, I think, the nineteen-seventies, but their progress since then has been quite remarkable.

The more serious issues are though:

1) Why should a species, capable of surviving, setting up permanent residence and flourishing, in environments as diverse as Scandinavia, Egypt and Sri Lanka, have waited until so recently to dip its toes in the water?

2) What halted its progress in the seventeenth century?

3) What happened in the early twentieth century, to set it way again, with such renewed vigour?

All of this occurred during a period of relative climatic and environmental stability......it really oughtn't to have happened!
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Hatty
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In: Berkshire
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What halted its progress in the seventeenth century?

My guess would be human intervention, perhaps to protect crops? Pigeons being greedy guts they were probably regarded as pests. Did areas they inhabited have an agricultural leap forward in the 17th/18th century? Another guess would be predators, birds of prey, possibly formerly 'tame' birds of prey going out of fashion at that time and being released or escaping into the wild.

There's a parallel in these parts regarding a native species, the red kite, which was eliminated by farmers who are said to have mistaken it for a bird of prey when it's actually a carrion bird; this doesn't ring quite true for me since farmers would doubtless be well aware that kites don't attack and kill their animals (the story goes that they saw the kites feeding on dead lambs and assumed they'd killed them). Anyroad, the kites were once a common sight in London cleaning up the streets so presumably they were no longer required, a nuisance even, when sanitation became more sophisticated. A decade or so ago the birds were reintroduced from Spain and from the original three pairs hundreds have now bred, spreading from the hills into the surrounding towns, can even see them from my bedroom window.
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Hatty
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In: Berkshire
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What happened in the early twentieth century, to set it way again, with such renewed vigour?

One of the main developments in recent times is medicine with an attendant drop in folk remedies; in India as elsewhere animals and birds were recognised as having certain medicinal properties including the pigeon/dove whose blood was thought to cure various serious afflictions from epilepsy to asthma to paralysis.

Could be that numbers have risen due to less indiscriminate ways of killing birds. Wild birds used to be caught in nets and slaughtered wholesale. These days it's illegal in most countries to exterminate large numbers of creatures, except for bird flu scares and the like.
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DPCrisp


In: Bedfordshire
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1) Why should a species, capable of surviving, setting up permanent residence and flourishing, in environments as diverse as Scandinavia, Egypt and Sri Lanka, have waited until so recently to dip its toes in the water?

Perhaps in the relevant respects, these are not diverse environments. Aren't these the birds that flourish on man-made cliffs and can turn any old garbage into 'milk' for their young? Sounds like you need to trace the state of the built environment.
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Hatty
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In: Berkshire
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Perhaps in the relevant respects, these are not diverse environments. Aren't these the birds that flourish on man-made cliffs and can turn any old garbage into 'milk' for their young? Sounds like you need to trace the state of the built environment.

That's true indeed. It's one of the few (only?) bird species that can be kept in confined conditions (pigeon-lofts, dove-cotes) and flourishes as happily in town as in country. Spreading urbanisation in the twentieth century adversely affects the majority of wildlife but not, it seems, the pigeon family whose ubiquity no doubt reflects the corresponding lack of both competitors and predators.
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Chad


In: Ramsbottom
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DPCrisp wrote:
1) Aren't these the birds that flourish on man-made cliffs and can turn any old garbage into 'milk' for their young?

No I think that's the rock dove. - The collared dove is the pretty little pinky-tan coloured one that seems to crop up in suburban gardens and is, I think, predominantly a grain eater.

Still can't sus this quote thingy...............
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Chad


In: Ramsbottom
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Most of these things had crossed my mind -- except the folk medicine thing -- but I don't see any of them shaping the expansion pattern in a way that would fit the bill.

They would be more likely to encounter birds of prey back home in India, than anywhere else on their journey. -- In fact I was working in Bangalore in the early nineties (no that's the nineteen-nineties -- before anybody asks) and I remember watching kites swoop down and take pigeons in mid flight. Also I think the netting of wild birds in Europe, probably reached its zenith during the very period that these doves were expanding across the region.

Eureka!.......................I've just re-read my original post and I think I've come up with something that makes everything fall into place..... amazing how seeing something in print, suddenly reveals the blindingly obvious.

The answer, I think, lies in WHERE rather than when, the original expansion phase ended.
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Chad


In: Ramsbottom
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This is what it looks like:

http://www.birdsource.org/gbbc/gallery/2006-photo-gallery/ecdotxvl.jpg/

Hope this works...........now I've mastered the quote thingy, there's no stopping me!
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Hatty
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In: Berkshire
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I wonder if human rather than avian diet is relevant. In a recent series about 'Wild China' even the poorest villagers were shown to be kind to animals, feeding the birds for instance; they were practising Buddhists and vegetarians.

It might be that doves once lived all over Europe and Asia and their numbers dropped due to being hunted by the human inhabitants for food or to protect crops, except in regions such as India where for cultural-religious reasons killing animals was restricted or even forbidden.
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Chad


In: Ramsbottom
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Here we go..... After having had my 'Eureka moment' I had to check out things to see if it held water. (I'm sure there's a pun in there somewhere).

Having re-read what I wrote earlier....

Chad wrote:
......... Middle East as far west as Turkey and part of the Balkans.

....it struck me that this felt familiar.....what else occupied this exact same area in the sixteen-hundreds?................ISLAM!!!!! ....the Persian Empire in the east and the Ottoman Empire in the west.

So did the Ottomans introduce these doves from India into Turkey and the Balkans?

It looks very probable, checkout this info, from a Turkish website promoting ....well....Turkey...and doves.

.....'compassion, in particular, for doves, and in general, all kinds of birds'..... According to Islam feeding birds and treating them well are good behaviors identified with acquiring merit in God.s sight. ..... 'This tradition was inherited from the Ottoman Society. In the Ottoman Society, as a result of the religious belief, doves were considered as holy birds.'

What's more. - doves were one of the birds that people were permitted, by Islam, to eat!

All the little buggers had to do then was wait about in the Balkans for a couple of hundred years or so, until conditions suited ......then onward and upward.

So could I find anything that happened in the region, just prior to their first appearance in Hungary, in the nineteen-thirties, that would facilitate their advance throughout the rest of Europe?

You betya. Have a read of this:

'The literature currently offers no consistent narrative about economic development on Europe's southeastern periphery prior to 1945'....'But within agriculture we find evidence for a new phase of intensification from the 1920s onwards.'

Just what they were waiting for.....right on cue......Bingo. Game over!
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Hatty
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In: Berkshire
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Doves are very significant in Islam I agree but they also figure prominently as symbols of peace, love and spirituality in all the major religions, in India (Hinduism) they're equated with messengers for the spirits of the dead, in Greek mythology they pulled Athena's chariot and in the OT, just as in the NT, doves appear as spiritual messengers too, the Spirit of Heaven descending etc.

The Ottomans must have consciously encouraged the spread of the dove. With such a widespread empire, from China to the Balkans and beyond, the dove may well have been a useful physical rather than spiritual messenger. It was the dove's speed that saved Jason from the Clashing Rocks.
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Hatty
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'The literature currently offers no consistent narrative about economic development on Europe's southeastern periphery prior to 1945'......'But within agriculture we find evidence for a new phase of intensification from the 1920s onwards.'

Wouldn't intensified agriculture be a disadvantage from a bird's eye point of view? More chemicals and machines, less hedgerows and 'left-overs' so to speak.

The Ottoman Empire ended in 1922/3. The doves would presumably have been released to fend for themselves thereafter.
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Chad


In: Ramsbottom
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Wouldn't intensified agriculture be a disadvantage from a bird's eye point of view? More chemicals and machines, less hedgerows and 'left-overs' so to speak.

No - just the opposite in fact. - It would have lead to a massive increase in cereal crop production and since, as I said earlier, the collared dove is predominantly a grain eater, it would have seemed like all their Christmases had come at once.

The Ottoman Empire ended in 1922/3. The doves would presumably have been released to fend for themselves thereafter.

Hadn't thought of that.......... I'd been thinking more along the lines of a rapid increase in an existing feral population..........come to think of it, I doubt a change in the ruling regime would have lead to ordinary folk changing domestic habits they had engaged in for generations.
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Hatty
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In: Berkshire
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Hmm. The beginning of efficient modernised crop production, catching up with the rest of Europe, and the end of a moribund traditionalist regime are not entirely unrelated perhaps. And the flight of the dove happens to coincide with these two events...
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