When Tara and I moved to Reno in 2007, I started keeping a “yard list”—a list of all bird species seen in or from our yard—and made a reflexive division in my mind between the “good” birds and the “bad,” meaning native species vs introduced ones. The invasive European Starlings, House Sparrows, and Rock Pigeons were bad and everything else was good. (The California Quails that occasionally visit our yard might not be native to Reno either, but they’re handsome birds that I grew up seeing in Los Angeles, so I gave them the benefit of the doubt and put them on the “good” list.)
In 2010, some new birds showed up, the 60th “yard species” overall, but only the fourth clear non-native. At first, I just heard them, a low “wooo Hooo hoo,” off in the distance. Then they started appearing in our backyard, perched on the wires or high in the scraggly Siberian elm.
They were Eurasian Collared-Doves (Streptopelia decaocto), part of one of the great bird invasions in history. In the late 1800s, these birds were only found in central and southern Asia, but in the 20th century they made a great expansion north in Asia and west through nearly all of Europe and parts of north Africa, perhaps “released” from old geographic constraints by urbanization and climate change. And in the early 1980s, Collared-Doves from the Bahamas (descended from birds released by a pet dealer) flew over to Florida and from there rapidly spread west and north.
Eurasian Collared-Dove. (Photo from Iruka via Wikimedia Commons)
The pace of the Collared-Dove’s North American colonization made the earlier, impressively fast invasions of Starlings and House Sparrows seem leisurely: My old National Geographic Field Guide, published in 1987, mentions the occurrence of Collared-Doves in Florida but doesn’t even include a picture of the species or a map of its range; my new Sibley Guide shows that the species now occurs over virtually the entire contiguous United States outside of the northeast.
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Some people—a lot of people—would say that Eurasian Collared-Doves don’t belong here and are bad news. They’re alien invaders, in the same nasty class as the awful and ubiquitous House Sparrows and Starlings. Birders suspect them of pushing out the native Mourning Doves. There must now be millions of Eurasian Collared-Doves in North America—how could they not be doing harm?
Somehow, though, despite the fact that I was raised to think any introduced species is bad, and the most common ones are the worst, I haven’t been able to work up much venom toward the Collared-Doves. Maybe my lack of animosity or concern comes partly from the fact that they’re pretty birds, colored in pearly gray pastels, and with a light, airy way of flying, often with wing and tail feathers fanned out. Also, although they often make a harsh “aaaagh” call, their frequent song is the mellow, soothing “wooo Hooo hoo.” Basically, they look and sound soft, friendly, and peaceful, the epitome of a dove.
But there may be something else at work on my brain too, making me accept the Collared-Doves in a way that I couldn’t accept the Eastern Fox Squirrels that invaded our semi-wild neighborhood in Los Angeles decades ago, or the introduced tamarisk that lined desert rivercourses near where I lived in Tucson in the mid-1990s, or any number of other invasive species I’ve encountered over the years.
I think this “something else” is the recognition of what the naturalist and writer Lyanda Lynn Haupt has called “the new nature, where the romantic vision of nature as separate from human activity must be replaced by the realistic sense that all of nature, no matter how remote, is affected by what we do and how we live.” Part of this new view entails giving up an obsession with the pristine, with wild places supposedly untouched by human influence. For instance, Haupt is a great advocate of getting to know and appreciate animals such as crows, pigeons, and squirrels, species that most of us urbanites encounter constantly in our everyday lives on streets, in city parks, and in backyards.
Or, to take a more controversial example, another naturalist/writer, Emma Marris, argues that environmentalists have been too focused on conserving wilderness. Instead, Marris says, we should turn much of the planet into a “rambunctious garden,” crafting and tending healthy half-wild ecosystems that, among other things, mix native and non-native species. She thinks we should “work with nature as it changes and adapts to what we humans have done to planet Earth.” This doesn’t mean ignoring wilderness entirely, but it does represent a radical shift in priorities.
And, to get back specifically to the Eurasian Collared-Dove and other common introduced species, ecologist Ken Thompson claims that conservation biologists have unjustly vilified non-native species, promoting the misleading view that these “invaders” routinely destroy natural environments and drive native species to extinction. Thompson and others note that, for the great majority of introduced species, evidence for such negative impacts is inconclusive or non-existent. (Even European Starlings apparently aren’t nearly as bad as they’ve been made out to be.) Meanwhile, positive effects of introduced species—such as increases in native bird diversity linked to the presence of introduced honeysuckles in eastern North America—are underplayed or ignored. Thompson thinks that scientists have made far too much of the distinction between native and non-native. Management of species should be dictated by what they do to ecosystems, he argues, not where they came from.
Predictably, there has been backlash to these new perspectives. For instance, the “live and let live” attitude toward introduced species has been criticized as naïve and dangerous. And E. O. Wilson, in a debate with Emma Marris, accused her of giving up on real conservation. “Where do you plant the white flag you’re carrying?,” he asked.
I see where Wilson and other old school types are coming from. My sense of nature was formed to a great extent by backpacking trips in the Sierra Nevada, in high country where the native biota was largely intact, from western junipers and shooting stars to pikas and mountain kingsnakes. I don’t want to see those kinds of places disappear. I don’t want my and my kids’ experiences of nature to contract to watching crows chase each other over rooftops or identifying the bugs in our own rambunctious, half-native backyard garden (as much as I like doing those things).
Wasp-mimicking beetle (Xestoleptura crassipes) on a planted native buckwheat (Eriogonum ovalifolium) in our backyard. It’s kind of cool, but I hope this isn’t the whole future of nature. (Thanks to Merrill Peterson for identifying the beetle.)
Still, the “new nature” perspectives of people like Haupt, Marris, and Thompson strike me as realistic and, in some ways, optimistic reactions to our times. Sure, it would be nice if there were only, say, a billion people on the planet, and zero population growth, and everyone agreed that sustainability is more critical than economic expansion. But that’s not the way it is, and, in this often frightening real world we inhabit, maybe we need to change our assumptions and expectations.
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When I take walks or runs on Peavine Mountain, on the outskirts of Reno, I’m still bothered by the signs of human disturbance, all the crisscrossing roads and tracks, the broken glass and dog crap, the cheatgrass covering the slopes, and the corollary of the cheatgrass, the absence in many places of sagebrush that ought to be there. But I’m not as bothered as I used to be.
And when I see Collared-Doves around town, which is now pretty much every day, I have few if any bad thoughts about them. As far as I know, there is no clear evidence that they’re displacing Mourning Doves here or anywhere else. And, no matter what the Collared-Doves are doing to the natives, I have a hard time putting any blame on the birds themselves, since their rapid spread was probably almost entirely caused by changes wrought by humans, not by some inherent noxiousness in these doves.
Mostly I just see the Collared-Doves as an interesting new addition to the city’s bird fauna. I try to quickly pick them out from the Mourning Doves or Rock Pigeons just by the way they fly. I wonder about their calls and songs—What does the “aaaagh” call mean? Why do they sometimes cut off the “wooo Hooo hoo” song after the “wooo Hooo”? Above all, I’m amazed that these birds, which I’d never even heard of twenty years ago, were able to expand across the whole breadth of North America in just a few decades, becoming a common part of my world.
Maybe my warm feeling toward the Collared-Doves is something I should be worried about. Maybe it’s a sign that I’ve already planted the white flag, surrendering hope.
Or maybe it’s just part of recognizing that we should accept, even cherish, many things—but not all things—that don’t fit our vision of a perfect world.
The Monkey's Voyage 