Dove

There are several quarry species of dove in the United States—the white-winged dove and the band-tailed pigeon of the South and the West, and the Eurasian collared dove, an alien species that was introduced to the Bahamas from Holland in the 1970s and is gradually expanding westward. But the most abundant and widespread American game bird—a recent conservative figure put the population at 475 million—is the mourning dove (Zenaida macroura), so called because of their moaning, long-toned plaintive call. Mourning doves have a distribution across the continent from southern Canada to the Gulf of Mexico. They are migrants and huge flocks move south as winter encroaches, although some southern birds remain south all year.