[cobirds] African Collared-Doves-email not complete

My phone sent the previous email before I was ready. But I pretty much just needed to sign my name,

Deb Carstensen, Littleton, Arapahoe County

Sent from my iPhone

Begin forwarded message:

From: Eric DeFonso <bay.wren@gmail.com>
Date: October 22, 2014 at 2:08:02 AM MDT
To: cobirds@googlegroups.com
Subject: Fwd: [cobirds] Re: African Collared-Doves, Lafayette, Boulder County
Reply-To: bay.wren@gmail.com

Hi all,

I had the good fortune of birding in Puerto Rico last March, where, among other things, I had my first exposure to African Collared-Dove. As Nathan mentions, they are indeed vocally distinct from Eurasian Collared-Dove (and at least with the population I observed, subtly but detectably distinct visually).

Most of my experience with the bird was in the area of La Parguera, a town in the SW quarter of the island. I had my recording equipment with me on my travels, but all the AFCDs I encountered were in town (not surprisingly) in areas strewn with power lines which at the time were an unsolvable problem for my recording efforts due to heavy electromagnetic interference. I have since come up with makeshift solutions that would have allowed me to make a decent recording even next to a power line, but oh well, I'm not there anymore.

At any rate, the other main point I wanted to make here was that before and during my travels, I frequently used eBird to get info on where to go on the island for certain specialties, native or otherwise. According to eBird submissions made by visiting birders over the previous year or so, the vast majority of the collared-doves observed in that area were Eurasian, but I never once came across a collared-dove that I thought was a Eurasian. At least vocally, I thought *all* of them, and there were quite a few in town, were African. So I contend that there is widespread lack of awareness of the difference and in fact, even the existence, of African Collared-Dove. And it may well be that it's not just in Puerto Rico that birders are missing the identification of this separate and distinct taxon, but perhaps even here in North America, and as Ted diligently noted, perhaps even in our own Front Range backyards!

Good birding,

Eric

On Tue, Oct 21, 2014 at 11:26 AM, Nathan Pieplow <npieplow@gmail.com> wrote:

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Eric DeFonso
Boulder, CO

--
Eric DeFonso
Boulder, CO

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