The former - and nearly forgotten - commonness of the ring-necked dove (Streptopelia capicola) in Cape Town, South Africa

@adamwelz @jeremygilmore @tonyrebelo

While I was a teenager, growing up in Cape Town in the 'sixties, the ring-necked dove (Streptopelia capicola, https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/2959-Streptopelia-capicola and https://thebdi.org/2022/03/08/cape-turtle-dove-streptopelia-capicola/) was the common indigenous columbid in this metropolitan area in South Africa (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cape_Town).

At that time, the red-eyed dove (Streptopelia semitorquata, https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/2988-Streptopelia-semitorquata) was nominally present in Cape Town. However, I was unfamiliar with it or its call.

Today, the latter species is unquestionably the common member of its genus in Cape Town, with the erstwhile commonness of the former species nearly forgotten.

Two aspects of this species-replacement, which has been natural and spontaneous albeit ultimately anthropogenic, warrant mention here.

These are

• how rapidly indigenous birds can adapt to changes in the environment at a biogeographical scale, altering their distribution, habitat, and population-density over a period of merely a few decades, and
• how even major avifaunal changes, in regions well-populated by naturalists and ornithologists, can come to be forgotten because they happen gradually enough that, at each stage of the process, the status quo tends to be taken for granted.

Such changes, although remarkable in hindsight, can seem so mundane that naturalists and scientists do not bother to write them down for posterity. The substitution has been obvious to me over my lifetime. However, there is a risk that the fact of it may fail to be transmitted to subsequent generations.

What is simply a matter of experience for me may come, in future, to be merely some unsubstantiated historical hypothesis.

So, for the record:

• which readers remember a time when the call of the ring-necked dove was an everyday sound in the suburbs of Cape Town? and
• does anyone know of any publication that has documented this switch from one congener to another?

Publicado el mayo 28, 2024 03:58 TARDE por milewski