This week’s Bird of the Week, compliments of the Weminuche Audubon Society and Audubon Rockies, is the band-tailed pigeon.
This relative of the rock pigeon, an introduced bird commonly found in cities worldwide, is a forest pigeon native to North America. It lives either in wet forests along the Pacific coast or in the dry mountain forests of the southwest. In our area these are migratory birds that breed in mixed forests of pine and oak with berry-producing shrubs.
The band-tailed is gregarious year-round and may travel in flocks of up to 300 birds. It is a pretty, large pigeon with grayish upperparts and purplish underparts. Adults have a white crescent on the back of the neck above a patch of iridescent green, scaly-looking feathers. The yellow bill has a black tip and the eyes are red.
Band-tailed pigeons are almost entirely vegetarian, consuming pine nuts, acorns, fruits and grain seeds. They are known to travel long distances away from their breeding grounds daily to feed. This habit developed the homing instincts pigeons are known for.
Although they are fairly secretive, they will come to sunflower feeders large enough to accommodate their size.
As is typical with most pigeons, the band-tailed nest is a thrown together layer of sticks that would seem to offer little protection for eggs or nestlings. Although they may raise up to three broods in a season, typically only one egg is laid each time. Both parents share incubation and feeding duties, and protection from nest predators including ravens, scrub-jays and squirrels. Like other doves, both parents feed nestlings a secretion from the esophagus known as crop milk.
The band-tailed is the closest genetic relative of the passenger pigeon, whose extinction in the early 1900s has been attributed to unregulated hunting by humans. Once the most abundant bird in North America, traveling in flocks numbering in the hundreds of millions, disappearance of passenger pigeons in the wild inspired early laws for wildlife protection.
Partners in Flight lists the band-tailed pigeon as a “common bird in steep decline.” Causes of population losses are not well understood and raise concerns that this bird might also go the way of the passenger pigeon.
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