Those rude noises overhead belong to invasive doves

Today’s question:

I have a friend who always makes [weird hornking sound] whenever he is trying to make a point. The other day I was working in the yard and heard the same [weird hornking noise] and looked around and saw it was coming from a dove. Can you tell me what kind of dove it is and why it makes that sound? This one came in as voicemail and I can’t really duplicate the noise the guy made on the phone.

I can, however, make a pretty good guess at the bird involved, mostly because they infest my neighborhood, too, and I’m pretty sure I answered this once before.

They are Eurasian collared doves, one of the fastest-spreading invasive species ever introduced to North America.

Sometime in the 1970s a few of these pets escaped during a burglary at a pet store in the Bahamas. By the early 1980s they were in Florida and since have spread northwest across the continent.

That annoying noise they make has been described as a nasal shriek or the sound of someone barfing.

No one seems to know why for sure, but it seems they only make that noise when they are coming in for a landing.

Invasive species generally are known for driving out natives by competing for food or habitat. In the case of Eurasian collared doves, researchers at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology have found there actually are more native dove species at sites where the invader has moved in than there used to be.

There probably is a good reason for this, but I am not sure they have found it yet.