Columbidae

• 1. Introduction

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  Columbidae gathers 353 species of doves and pigeons into 52 genera, and it stands alone as the only family in the order Columbiformes. Its birds are stout-bodied, with small heads, fairly short necks and slender bills. On some species the bill carries a fleshy patch at its base, known as a cere. Nearly all of them live on plants, taking seeds, fruit or leaves. Yet this family also holds some of the most famous extinct birds ever recorded. How do you tell a dove from a pigeon, if you can at all? How did these birds reach the most remote islands on Earth? And why did a family so often found close to people lose so many of its members?

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• 2. Names and Family Tree

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  The word pigeon is French, and it descends from the Latin pīpiō, which meant a chick. Dove has a different root. It matches Old Norse dūfa and Gothic dubo, and it comes from a Proto-Germanic word that imitated the cooing of the woodpigeon and the stock dove. A group of doves has sometimes been called a dule, borrowed from the French word deuil. In everyday English, smaller species tend to be doves and larger ones pigeons. The habit is inconsistent, and science draws no line between the two.

  In 1819 the English zoologist William Elford Leach used the name Columbidae in a guide to the contents of the British Museum. Yet Illiger had already set up an older family-group name, Columbini, in 1811. That makes Illiger the proper authority for the family.

  Disagreement over how to carve up the family runs deep. As many as five to six families have been used in the past, including Raphidae for the dodo and the Rodrigues solitaire. A 2024 paper by Young and colleagues recommended three subfamilies instead: Columbinae, Claravinae and Raphinae. A 2025 paper by Oswald and colleagues studied the Cuban blue-headed quail-dove and found it to be a sister group to Columbinae. They proposed a fourth subfamily for it alone, called Starnoenadinae.

  The fossil record offers little help, because columbids are poorly represented and no truly primitive form has turned up. The genus Gerandia, from Early Miocene deposits in France, was long taken for a pigeon but is now considered a sandgrouse. Rupephaps, a probable fruit pigeon from the Early Miocene Bannockburn Formation of New Zealand, is a genuine early find. Genome studies place the order's roots in the Cretaceous, with a rapid burst of diversification at the end of that era. They also show its closest relatives to be the sandgrouses and the mesites. The newest genus-level family tree comes from a 2026 study by Andrew Sweet and collaborators, which sampled 43 of the 48 living genera.

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• 3. Body and Flight

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  Medieval naturalists noticed that doves have no gall bladder and concluded that the birds make no bile. Under the old theory of the four humours, that seemed to explain their supposedly sweet disposition. Aristotle had already realized the truth. Doves do make bile, and it simply flows straight into the gut.

  Most species have large wings with eleven primary feathers. Wing muscles make up 31-44% of a pigeon's body weight, which places pigeons among the strongest fliers of all birds. Broad wings give low wing loading and a low aspect ratio. Together these allow quick launches and sharp manoeuvres to escape predators, though at a high cost in energy.

  In 1975 Dr. Mark B. Friedman ran experiments on doves to explain their characteristic head bobbing. He showed that the bobbing keeps their vision steady. In 1978 Dr. Barrie J. Frost put pigeons on treadmills, and they stopped bobbing because their surroundings no longer shifted.

  Columbids carry unusual body feathers, each with a broad, strong, flattened shaft that tapers abruptly to a fine point. The feather bases are dense and fluffy, set loosely in the skin, and they drop out easily. If a predator snatches the bird, a mouthful of loose feathers may help it break free. Seed-eating species usually wear dull plumage, while fruit-eating species are brightly coloured. Chalcophaps, Ptilinopus and Alectroenas include some of the most colourful pigeons of all.

  A few species are true long-distance migrants. Some populations of the European turtle dove cover more than 5,000 km between northern Europe in summer and tropical Africa in winter. The Oriental turtle dove travels almost as far, between eastern Siberia and southern China.

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• 4. Giants and Dwarfs

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  The common ground dove, Columbina passerina, can weigh as little as 22 g, only slightly more than a house sparrow. Even smaller in length is the dwarf fruit dove, which may measure just 13 cm and is marginally shorter than any other member of the family.

  At the other end, the crowned pigeons of New Guinea are nearly the size of turkeys. They measure 66-79 cm in length and weigh between 1.8 and 4 kg. One of the largest tree-dwelling species is the Marquesan imperial pigeon, at 55 cm, and it is now fighting extinction.

  The largest columbid of all time was the flightless dodo, standing about 62.6-75 cm tall. Suggested weights run from 10.2 to 27.8 kg, though the highest estimates are thought to rest on overfed birds.

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• 5. Where They Live

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  Pigeons and doves occur almost everywhere on Earth, with exceptions only in the driest parts of the Sahara Desert, in Antarctica and its surrounding islands, and in the high Arctic. Their greatest diversity is in the Indomalayan and Australasian realms. They have settled most of the world's oceanic islands, including eastern Polynesia, the Chatham Islands, Mauritius, the Seychelles, Réunion and the Azores. Their habitats include savanna, grassland, shrubland, desert, temperate woodland, tropical rainforest, mangrove forest and even the barren sands and gravels of atolls. Some species live in trees, some on the ground, and some in between.

  The eared dove ranges across all of South America, from Colombia to Tierra del Fuego. The Eurasian collared dove spans a broken but vast stretch from Britain through Europe, the Middle East, India and Pakistan to China. The laughing dove covers most of sub-Saharan Africa, plus India, Pakistan and the Middle East.

  Once human introductions are counted, the rock dove, also called the common pigeon, has the widest range of any species. Its natural home ran from Britain and Ireland to northern Africa, and east across Europe, Arabia, Central Asia, India, the Himalayas, China and Mongolia. Domestication expanded that range dramatically, because the birds went feral in cities around the world. They now live across most of North America and in the cities of South America, sub-Saharan Africa, Southeast Asia, Japan, Australia and New Zealand. A 2020 study found two pigeon genetic megacities on the east coast of the United States, in New York and Boston. The birds of the two cities do not mix.

  Other species are confined to tiny places. The whistling dove lives only on Kadavu Island in Fiji, and the Caroline ground dove only on Truk and Pohnpei. The Grenada dove is found nowhere but the island of Grenada. Some continental species are just as restricted. The black-banded fruit dove keeps to a small part of Arnhem Land in Australia, and the Somali pigeon to a small area of northern Somalia. Moreno's ground dove is endemic to the area around Salta and Tucuman in northern Argentina.

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• 6. Food and Nests

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  Seeds and fruit make up most of the diet, and the family splits loosely into seed-eaters and fruit-eaters, although many species take both. Seed-eaters feed mostly on the ground, with thick-walled gizzards, intestines and esophagi, and fairly long intestines. Fruit-eaters feed mainly in trees, with thin walls and short intestines. They can cling to branches and even hang upside down to reach a fruit.

  The atoll fruit dove specialises in insects and reptiles. Ground doves and quail-doves eat many insects and worms. Snails and moths are taken by white-crowned pigeons, orange fruit doves and ruddy ground doves, and some species also eat flowers. Urban feral pigeons, descended from domestic rock doves, depend on people instead. They forage for spilled food or for scraps that humans provide.

  Dove and pigeon nests are flimsy structures of sticks, plant matter and debris. They may sit in trees, on rocky ledges or on the ground. In some species the female builds with material the male gathers, and in others the male builds alone. A few species nest in colonies. Most lay one or, more often, two white eggs, which hatch after 11-30 days. Larger species take longer.

  Both sexes feed their young with crop milk, which is unusual among birds. This fluid is made when cells slough off the lining of the crop. Unfledged chicks are called squabs, and they can generally fly by five weeks old. Once weaned, the fledglings are called squeakers, named for their immature voices, and they leave the nest after 25-32 days.

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• 7. Vanishing Species

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  Ten species have gone extinct since 1600, the conventional starting date for counting modern extinctions, and two of them are the dodo and the passenger pigeon. The passenger pigeon was exceptional. It is the only mainland pigeon to have gone extinct in modern times, even though it was once the most numerous bird on Earth. The ornithologist Alexander Wilson estimated that one flock he saw held more than two billion birds. In 1871 a single breeding colony was estimated at over a hundred million birds, yet the last individual was dead by 1914. Habitat loss played a part, but massive hunting is thought to have done the most harm. The birds were sold as food for slaves and later for the poor across the nineteenth-century United States.

  The dodo's fate was more typical of pigeon extinctions. Like many colonists of remote islands with few predators, it lost most of its fear of enemies, along with its ability to fly. The arrival of people, along with rats, pigs and cats, quickly ended it, as it did for many other island birds.

  Today 118 columbid species, or 34% of the family, are at risk. The count breaks down into 48 near threatened, 40 vulnerable, 18 endangered, 11 critically endangered and 1 extinct in the wild. Most are tropical and live on islands, and every one faces introduced predators, habitat loss, hunting, or some mix of these. The Socorro dove of Socorro Island, Mexico, was last seen in the wild in 1972, a victim of habitat loss and feral cats. Elsewhere the facts are simply missing. The Negros fruit dove has not been seen since 1953 and may or may not be extinct. The Polynesian ground dove is listed as critically endangered, though nobody knows whether it still survives on remote islands in the far west of the Pacific.

  Conservationists use laws to limit hunting, protected areas to stop habitat loss, and captive populations for release back into the wild. They also translocate individuals to suitable habitats to start additional populations.

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• 8. Partners of People

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  Studies suggest the rock dove was domesticated as early as 10 thousand years ago, giving rise to the domestic pigeon, Columba livia domestica. Doves became symbols of the goddesses Innana, Asherah and Aphrodite. Early Christian, Islamic and Jewish traditions revered them as well.

  Domestication also produced homing pigeons, which carried messages and served in wartime. In World War II, 32 pigeons received the Dickin Medal for "brave service" to their country.

  The barbary dove, a smaller domestic columbid, was kept as food. Breeders selected for tame birds that would not escape their cages. As a result, it lost its survival instinct and cannot survive if released.

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