Post Script: Pigeons and Doves

When we were visiting with our friend in Tennesssee, he told us of a man who had gone dove hunting in South America.  There were so many birds, he went for a Guinness Book of World Records.  With the help of several men, he shot doves from 8 in the morning until 8 at night.  Those helping him reloaded the guns and actually cooled the barrels off in buckets of water.  At the end of the day he had shot 3000 doves!

This took me back to my Passenger Pigeon story and the rapid extinction of that species, in part because of overzealous shooters.

When I looked it up, I discovered a great many websites advertising dove hunting, primarily in Argentina. They are after the Eared Dove, a close relative of the Mourning Dove.  Sound familiar?
Here's what I found.

Eared Doves provide the last big-bag shooting experience in the world. There are estimated to be more than 23 million of these doves in the fields around Córdoba in northern Argentina, and recent estimates put the figure in the 32 million range. It is not unknown for a single gun to shoot 1000 birds in a day.

The scale of this wing-shooting recalls the numbers of Passenger Pigeons taken by North American gunners in the 1800s. That hunting pressure brought the Passenger Pigeon to rapid extinction, but the Eared dove seems to be more resilient. Indeed, as with the Passenger Pigeons, Eared Dove populations in Argentina and Bolivia sometimes "darken the skies". Thus, it seems that populations on the sporting estates of Argentina are holding their own, with the birds breeding four times a year and thriving on the vast areas of grain, some grown for their benefit, most of it on commercial farms which are happy to support the dove shooting.

One Estancia estimates that there are one million doves on its estate alone. The season extends is year around. .

The Eared Doves  do not migrate, and the enormous flocks are described as flying constantly between their roosting woods and the open fields. In the Cordoba region in Argentina the Eared Doves are known as palomas doradas because of the shining feathers sometimes present in their plumage.

Locals in Bolivia atest that Eared Doves, which they call  totaky were quite rare in the region just a couple of decades ago, a testimony not only to the resilience of the species but to the huge impact that the newly-created large feeding grounds have on dove populations.

Thus say those who promote the hunting.  But, all good things come to an end, and with this type of hunting, surely the doves of South America are destined at some point to suffer the same fate as the passenger pigeon did in North America.