Urban birds

David Lindo continues his series looking at urban birds and this month he waxes lyrical about the Collared Dove

The Collared Dove is one of those birds whose presence you often dismiss. Cute looking, with a gentle demeanour; you cannot help but like this adorable dove. They are very much a part of urban life, certainly suburbia, with their incessant cooing being part of the soundtrack for many of us.

In the UK, they are much loved and the staple of rural and commuter belt life, present in many a garden feeding station. In Europe, the story is very similar, as nowadays on the continent, there is scarcely a place where you won’t see a Collared Dove or three.

I remember watching flocks in Valencia flying around together, or hearing multitudes cooing at the same time in other Spanish towns and villages. In Germany, they are known as Die Fernsehtaube, ‘the Television Dove’, due to them being regularly noticed on top of TV aerials.

Curiously, they are yet to penetrate the heart of our British cities. In Central London they are still a scarcity to be celebrated. I remember how excited I felt when I saw the occasional bird in

St James’s Park. Invariably, it was flying through en route to destinations unknown – the event itself noteworthy for the London Bird Club. During my tenure birding

regularly at Wormwood

Scrubs in west London, they were scarce visitors, seen only a few times a year, and never on the deck or even sitting in a tree or on a roof. Most strange. Yet, literally 1.5 miles to the west in leafy Acton, they were to be found in relative abundance.

Earlier, I mentioned the familiarity that most of us hold for this species, but it wasn’t always like this. Any birder over the age of 70 may remember Collared Doves very differently. They were unknown in the country before the early 1950s and vagrants that showed up in Norfolk drew crowds to twitch them.

The story of the rise of the Eurasian Collared Dove, or to be more exact, their spread, is nothing short of an ornithological wonder. The species has been described as one of the great avian colonisers of the world. This pigeon is not migratory but strongly dispersive, having spread from its original range in subtropical Asia east to Turkey. They seemed to have a built-in predisposition to head west. In 1838, it was first reported in Bulgaria. By the early 1900s they had reached the Balkans, Germany by 1945 and Great Britain by 1953, where the first breeding occurred in 1956. Three years later they were in Ireland and the northerly climes of the Faroe Islands by the early 1970s.

They had a bit of a helping hand in the US, when about 50 birds were liberated in Nassau, Bahamas, from where they have spread into practically every US state.

I will never forget birding at the Salton Sea in California and stumbling across a small flock in some scrub.

The Salton Sea is a shallow landlocked saline lake situated in an arid valley and in seeking shelter I disturbed some roosting Lesser Nighthawks. It was while watching them swoop around that I discovered the Collared Doves sitting quietly in a bush.

They confused me at first, as I was not expecting to see them so far from ‘home’. Interestingly, Collared Doves were originally birds of open and essentially dry deciduous country in their Asian distribution heartland, switching to more urban environs in the west. Perhaps my Californian birds were oddly reminded of their distant past as they sat in semi-arid scrub.

One thing is for sure, it is the true ‘beast from the east’. The trigger for its rapid expansion is poorly understood. However, it cannot be denied that part of the reason for its success in populating so many new territories is its propensity for multiple broods. This bird can breed at any time of the year. I have heard many stories from people speaking of birds nesting in weird locations or on their flimsy nests in garden trees at Christmas, while snow lay all around.

Speaking of snow, I love watching the Collared Doves that share the same trees as dozens of roosting Long-eared Owls that winter in many of the northern towns in Serbia. By day, the doves would busy themselves feeding in the streets or on spilt grain in the nearby farmland.

At the end of a long day, they themselves would turn in to roost on the very branches that were previously occupied by the owls. A perfect example of co-existing. Or so you may think. During hard winters when the owls struggle to find their usual rodent prey, they turn on their bedfellows for sustenance. The owls are clearly delighted by the spread of the Collared Dove!