Geographic Variation in Size of Female Wild Rock Doves

Abstract

The Rock Dove (Columba livia) was domesticated around 5,000 years ago in the eastern Mediterranean region generally called the Near East (Levi 1974). Escapes of domestics from confinement for thousands of years have provided stocks that developed into feral populations. Feral pigeons now have characteristics of both wild and domestic ancestry, frequently live essentially as though they are wholly wild, and are capable of broadscale genetic introgression in wild colonies (Johnston et al. 1988, Johnston and Janiga 1995). In western Europe, wild colonies are known to exist in the Outer Hebrides of Scotland and perhaps on the coastline of northern and western Ireland; in the Mediterranean basin, wild colonies are known from coastal Sardinia, northwestern Egypt, and perhaps Libya and montane sectors of the former Yugoslavia. Interior montane North Africa, the Near East, Afghanistan, Pakistan, northwestern montane India, southwestern China, Uzbekistan, and Russia probably have Rock Dove populations that are still isolated from feral pigeons, but recent information is fragmentary. No information exists on the degree to which wild Rock Doves are killed for food by humans living under high densities in politically and economically unstable regions, but the birds can be subjected to overharvesting when their nesting cliffs are discovered by people short of dietary protein. For these reasons, as well as of the difficulties in travelling to some of the regions just noted, specimen samples of wild Rock Doves are not likely to be significantly augmented in the near future. An earlier report (Johnston 1992) on size variation was restricted to samples of male specimens, although a display of sexual size dimorphism over the characters employed was provided. Here I provide comparable data for females.