remember: the ‘holy’ white doves are just white rock doves, aka the common pigeon!
Doves are just pigeons with white privilege
Also can we talk about how STUNNING their irredentist feathers are?
This post made me finally look up whether Australian crested pigeons are also doves, and I didn’t quite understand the wiki page but I think the answer is ‘yes’.
You guys are gonna go ham when you hear about fruit doves
But get a load of these fat bois. The kererū, or New Zealand wood pigeon.
with regards to what is a dove and what is a pigeon- so pigeons & doves make up the family of birds called the columbidae, and there’s a few hundred of them- even the famously extinct dodo bird is a member of the family!
the animal that usually comes to mind when you think “pigeon” is, as noted above, the common rock dove- specifically, the feral populations of domesticated rock doves that are found in cities worldwide. these are not truly wild animals- they’re the descendants of domestic pigeons, which is why you’ll find lots of color and pattern variation looking at city pigeons, like you might looking at a feral cat colony. the undomesticated rock dove lives in northern africa and southwestern eurasia natively, it was the species from which our domestic pigeons were derived- much like red jungle fowl to chickens, and wolves to dogs.
a flock of feral pigeons on the left, and an undomesticated rock dove on the right. note the variation in colors and patterns on the feral flock- some are lighter, darker, have checkered sides, and so on. the rock dove is a more solid light grey with two distinct black wing bars, but feral pigeons can look just like this, too. these all represent only the single species we tend to be most familiar with, only one of the hundreds of species of pigeons/doves out there (such as the various sorts of fruit doves above)!
but the actual difference between what species are called pigeons and what are called doves: well, there really isn’t. generally folks tend to call the larger ones pigeons and smaller ones doves, but this is not at all consistent and there are no specific pigeon or dove clades (evolutionary groupings) within the family. ergo, functionally speaking, ‘pigeon’ and ‘dove’ are pretty much interchangeable.
