Malagasy Turtle Dove

Malagasy Turtle Dove
Malagasy Turtle Dove
On Praslin island, Seychelles
Conservation status
Scientific classification
Kingdom: Animalia
Phylum: Chordata
Class: Aves
Order: Columbiformes
Family: Columbidae
Genus: Nesoenas
Species: N. picturata
Binomial name
Nesoenas picturata
(Temminck, 1813)
Synonyms

Columba picturata (Temminck, 1813)
Homopelia picturata (Temminck, 1813)
Streptopelia picturata Temminck, 1813

The Malagasy Turtle Dove (Nesoenas picturata), also known as the Malagasy Turtle-dove, is a bird species in the pigeon and dove family, Columbidae. It is found in British Indian Ocean Territory, Comoros, Madagascar, Mauritius, Mayotte, Réunion, and Seychelles. It has several subspecies. The Rodrigues Turtle-dove, an extinct but fairly enigmatic taxon from Rodrigues on the Mascarenes may have been another subspecies of N. picturata or a distinct species N. rodericana.

Nesoenas picturata aldabrana
Nesoenas picturata

The Pink Pigeon (N. mayeri) is its closest living relative, and together they form a lineage apart from both the typical pigeons (Columba) and the typical turtle-doves (Streptopelia), slightly closer to the latter if anything. Consequently, either these two are both placed in Streptopelia, or – as is probably the most accurate solution at present – separated as Nesoenas. The present species was in former times sometimes placed in a monotypic genus Homopelia. While this is not outright wrong, if the Rodrigues population is also placed in Homopelia and Nesoenas is considered distinct too, it would probably be considered oversplitting by modern authors.[1]

Though some island populations are rare – some precariously so – as a whole N. picturata is considered a Species of Least Concern by the IUCN.[2]

Footnotes

  1. ^ Johnson et al. (2001), Cheke (2005), BLI (2008)
  2. ^ BLI (2008)

References

Media related to Nesoenas picturata at Wikimedia Commons

  • BirdLife International (BLI) (2008). Nesoenas picturata. In: IUCN 2008. IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. Downloaded on 1 January 2010.
  • Cheke, Anthony S. (2005): Naming segregates from the Columba–Streptopelia pigeons following DNA studies on phylogeny. Bull. B.O.C. 125(4): 293-295. PDF fulltext
  • Johnson, Kevin P.; de Kort, Selvino; Dinwoodey, Karen, Mateman, A. C.; ten Cate, Carel; Lessells, C. M. & Clayton, Dale H. (2001): A molecular phylogeny of the dove genera Streptopelia and Columba. Auk 118(4): 874-887. DOI:10.1642/0004-8038(2001)118[0874:AMPOTD]2.0.CO;2 PDF fulltext


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