The call was very familiar. I have been hearing it on the barrier islands off Sarasota, Florida, since we purchased a condo there in 2003. In July of 2008, I heard it for the first time on our Littleton, Colorado, farm and it has since become a ubiquitous sound on that property. Yesterday morning, while walking through a parking lot in Columbia, Missouri, I heard it for the first time in a city that has been our second home for over 15 years.
The call, echoing down from the top of a light pole, was delivered by a Eurasian collared dove, a native of India and the Middle East that has spread through much of North America over the past 30 years (see March of the Collared Dove). A larger cousin of the morning dove, the collared dove was released in the Bahamas in 1975 and first turned up in Florida in the early 1980s. It reached Colorado by 1996 and was first observed in Missouri in 1998; while this dove has been observed in central Missouri throughout the past decade, I did not encounter one in Columbia until yesterday. As one who regularly ventures into natural habitats, maintains backyard feeders and has been an avid birder since the mid 1970s, it certainly took long enough!
As veteran birders know, being at the right place at the right time plays a major role in bird sightings. On the other hand, I have never set out with the specific goal of finding a collared dove in central Missouri and seldom consult rare bird reports. Hardly a birding fanatic, I engage in the hobby in concert with hiking and general nature exploration and may have ignored the familiar call at times in the past. Based on my experience in Colorado, however, it will soon be impossible to miss these prolific and highly adaptable immigrants in Columbia.
