Mauritius blue pigeon

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Mauritius blue pigeon
Mounted skin in the National Museum of Scotland, one of three in existence

Extinct (ca. 1830s)  (IUCN 3.1)[1]
Scientific classification Edit this classification
Domain: Eukaryota
Kingdom: Animalia
Phylum: Chordata
Class: Aves
Order: Columbiformes
Family: Columbidae
Genus: Alectroenas
Species:
†A. nitidissimus
Binomial name
†Alectroenas nitidissimus
(Scopoli, 1786)
Location of Mauritius in blue
Synonyms
List
  • Columba nitidissima Scopoli, 1786
  • Columba franciae Gmelin, 1789
  • Columba batavica Bonnaterre, 1790
  • Columba jubata Wagler, 1827
  • Alectroenas franciae Gray, 1840
  • Alectroenas nitidissimus
  • Columbigallus franciae Des Murs, 1854
  • Ptilopus nitidissimus Schlegel & Pollen, 1868

The Mauritius blue pigeon (Alectroenas nitidissimus) is an

molluscs
, and was once widespread in the forests of Mauritius.

The bird was first mentioned in the 17th century and was described several times thereafter, but very few accounts describe the behaviour of living specimens. The oldest record of the species is two sketches from a 1601–1603 ship's journal. Several stuffed specimens reached Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries, while only three stuffed specimens exist today. A live bird kept in the Netherlands around 1790 was long thought to have been a Mauritius blue pigeon, but examination of illustrations depicting it have shown it was most likely a Seychelles blue pigeon. The species is thought to have become extinct in the 1830s due to deforestation and predation.

Taxonomy

The oldest record of the Mauritius blue pigeon is two sketches in the 1601–1603 journal of the Dutch ship Gelderland.[2] The birds appear to have been freshly killed or stunned. The drawings were made by the Dutch artist Joris Joostensz Laerle on Mauritius, but were not published until 1969.[3][4] François Cauche in 1651 briefly mentioned "white, black and red turtle doves", encountered in 1638, which is thought to be the first unequivocal mention of the bird. The next account is that of Jean-François Charpentier de Cossigny in the mid-18th century.[5]

Sonnerat
's 1782 description

The French naturalist

scientific naming of the bird was left to the Tyrolean naturalist Giovanni Antonio Scopoli, who did not observe a specimen himself, but Latinised Sonnerat's description in 1786.[9] He named the bird Columba nitidissima, which means "most brilliant pigeon".[8]

The German naturalist

IOC World Bird List in 2012.[13]

Another skin arrived at the Paris museum in 1800, collected by Colonel M. Mathieu for the French ornithologist

Subfossil remains of the Mauritius blue pigeon were collected in the Mare aux Songes swamp by Théodore Sauzier in 1889. More were collected by Etienne Thirioux around 1900. They are thought to have been found near Le Pouce mountain and Plaine des Roches.[8]

Evolution

Alectroenas blue pigeons are closely interrelated and occur widely throughout islands in the western

Mascarene islands were each home to a species, all of which are extinct: the Mauritius blue pigeon, the Rodrigues blue pigeon (A. payandeei), and the Réunion blue pigeon (A. sp.).[10]

Compared with other pigeons, the blue pigeons are medium to large, stocky, and have longer wings and tails. All the species have distinct mobile

fruit doves (Ptilinopus) of Southeast Asia and Oceania.[20]

Misidentified records

Life drawings long thought to depict a displaying Mauritius blue pigeon, but now believed to have been a Seychelles blue pigeon
, by Gijsbertus Haasbroek, ca. 1790

A blue pigeon recorded as being from Mauritius was brought to the Netherlands around 1790, where it survived in the

calls sounding like "baf baf", as well as a cooing sound.[21]

Unlike the three surviving skins of Mauritius blue pigeons, Haasbroek's illustration shows a red forehead. Both sexes of the Seychelles blue pigeon also have red foreheads, and the English palaeontologist Julian P. Hume suggested that the image depicts a male, which was described as "infinitely more handsome" than the female by Cossigny in the mid-18th century. Hume therefore interpreted the three surviving skins as belonging to female specimens.[21]

In 2020, the Dutch researcher and artist Ria Winters noted that the depicted bird was in fact a Seychelles blue pigeon.[22] The British ecologist Anthony S. Cheke elaborated on this point in 2020 (after a third Haasbroek illustration of this individual resurfaced at an auction), and noted that because one of Haasbroek's paintings was originally published in monochrome in 1969, this may have blinded later researchers, even when the coloured version resurfaced. Cheke found it perfectly clear that the colouration was consistent with a Seychelles blue pigeon, as its tail is dark blue instead of red, and the crown is red instead of white. Cheke also suggested that the name "Pavillons Hollandais" mentioned by Vosmaer was a corruption of pigeon hollandais, the name also used for the Mauritius blue pigeon, as both species have the red, white and blue colours similar to the Dutch flag. While Vosmaer's record of the bird coming from Mauritius was misleading, it may have been correct since it was probably shipped from the Seychelles via Mauritius, and would likely therefore have been reported as such (the Seychelles were a dependency of Mauritius at the time).[7]

Description

Pauline Knip showing dark legs
1808 illustration by J. Reinold, erroneously showing the legs as red

The feathers on the head, neck and breast of the Mauritius blue pigeon were silvery white, long, stiffened and pointed, especially around the neck. A patch of bright red, naked skin surrounded the eyes, and extended across the cheeks to the beak, which was greenish with a dark tip. The plumage of the body was

slate-grey. The iris was reddish orange and had an inner yellow ring.[23]

The bird was 30 cm (12 in) in length, the wings were 208 mm (8.2 in), the tail was 132 mm (5.2 in), the

culmen was 25 mm (1 in), and the tarsals were 28 mm (1.10 in).[2] It was the largest and most robust member of its genus, and the hackles were longer and covered a larger area than in other blue pigeons. A Mauritian woman recalling observations of Mauritius blue pigeons around 1815 mentioned green as one of its colours. Juvenile Seychelles and Comoro blue pigeons have green feathers, so this may also have been the case for juvenile Mauritian pigeons.[21]

Some depictions and descriptions have shown the legs of Mauritius blue pigeons as red, like those of the Madagascar blue pigeon. The legs of the Paris specimen were painted red when the original colour faded, presumably on the basis of such accounts. The legs of the two other surviving specimens have not been painted and have faded to a yellowish brown. This feature is not mentioned in contemporary accounts, and such depictions are thought to be erroneous. Some modern illustrations of the bird have also depicted it with facial crenulations, like those of the Seychelles blue pigeon.[24] This feature was unknown from contemporary accounts, until the 1660s report of Johannes Pretorius about his stay on Mauritius was published in 2015, where he mentioned the bird's "warty face".[25]

Behaviour and ecology

Few descriptions of the behaviour of Mauritius blue pigeons are known; unpublished notes by Desjardins are now lost.

deforested during this time.[26]

Subfossil tarsometatarsus leg-bone in Naturalis Biodiversity Center

Many other endemic species of Mauritius became extinct after the arrival of humans, so the

palm orchid, have also become extinct.[29]

Diet

1907 illustration of the Paris specimen by John Gerrard Keulemans

Fruits and nuts were probably the mainstay of the Mauritius blue pigeon's diet, and like other blue pigeons, it may have occupied the upper

Calophyllum tacamahaca or Labourdonnaisia calophylloides. The Comoro and Seychelles blue pigeons also feed on C. tacamahaca, and the strong gizzard of the former helps in the digestion of the seeds.[24]
In 1812 Jacques Gérard Milbert provided the only description of the behaviour of the bird in the wild:

The second is the pigeon with a mane; the inhabitants of the Ile de France [Mauritius] call it pigeon hollandais; the head, neck and chest are adorned with long pointed white feathers which it can raise at will; the rest of the body, and the wings, are a fine deep violet; the end of the tail is a purplish red. It is one of the finest species of its kind ... The second of these birds lives solitary in river valleys, where I have often seen it without being able to secure one. It eats fruit and fresh water molluscs.[26]

The claim that the bird fed on river

freshwater snails, and one was seen hunting tadpoles. Milbert may in any case have been referring to arboreal snails, as extant blue pigeons rarely land on the ground. A diet of snails would have provided the birds with calcium for egg production.[26] Pretorius attempted to keep juvenile and adult Mauritius blue pigeons in captivity, but all his specimens died. This is probably because the species was almost exclusively frugivorous, like extant blue pigeons.[25]

Extinction

The Mauritius blue pigeon coexisted with humans for 200 years. Its decline can be correlated with deforestation, which is also the main threat to extant blue pigeons.[23] Little lowland forest was left on the island by 1859. Frugivorous birds often need a large area for foraging and move between forest types to feed on different types of food, which grow irregularly. Other blue pigeons perch on bare branches, making them vulnerable to hunters.[32]

Sketches in the Gelderland ship's journal showing recently killed or stunned birds on Mauritius, by Joris Joostensz Laerle, 1601

Cossigny noted that the bird had become rare by 1755, but were common 23 years before, and attributed the decline to deforestation and hunting by escaped slaves. On the other hand, Bonnaterre stated they were still common in 1790. The Mauritius blue pigeon was not seasonally poisonous like the pink pigeon, which still survives on Mauritius today, but it was reputed to be. In spite of this, it was hunted for food, and some early accounts praised the flavour of the bird.[26] Extant blue pigeons are also considered good food, and are heavily hunted as a result, and it appears another population of them was hunted to extinction from the Farquhar and Providence islands. The Mauritius blue pigeon was easy to catch due to island tameness.[33]

The last confirmed specimen was shot in the Savanne district in 1826, but the 1832 report by Desjardins suggests that some could still be found in remote forests in the centre of the island.

Black River Gorges
, south western Mauritius:

When she was a girl and used to go into the forest with her father de Chazal, she has seen quantities of Pigeon Hollandais and Merles [

marron. She said it was larger than a tame pigeon & was all the colours of the rainbow, particularly about the head, red, green & blue.[33]

It can be concluded that the Mauritius blue pigeon became extinct in the 1830s. Apart from habitat destruction and hunting, introduced predators, mainly crab-eating macaques, were probably also responsible.[2]

References

Citations

  1. doi:10.2305/IUCN.UK.2016-3.RLTS.T22691601A93318208.en
    . Retrieved 13 November 2021.
  2. ^
    ISBN 978-0-8014-3954-4
    .
  3. doi:10.3366/anh.2003.30.1.13
    .
  4. ^
    ISSN 0067-4745
    .
  5. ^ Hume 2011, p. 33.
  6. ^ Cheke & Hume 2008, p. 143.
  7. ^ a b Cheke, A. S. (2020). "Correcting an egregious error -rediscovering early images of the Seychelles Blue Pigeon Alectroenas pulcherrimus, with a comment on Sonnerat's original misapplied geographical location". Phelsuma. 29: 54–59.
  8. ^ a b c d e f Hume 2011, p. 31.
  9. ^ Scopoli, G. A. (1786). Deliciae florae faunae insubricae, seu Novae, etc (in Latin). Vol. 2. p. 93.
  10. ^
    ISBN 978-1-4081-5725-1
    .
  11. ISBN 978-1-4081-2501-4
    .
  12. ^ Hume 2011, p. 28.
  13. ^ Gill, F.; Donsker, D. (2012). "Taxonomy 3.1–3.5". IOC World Bird List. Retrieved 11 March 2017.
  14. ^ "Alectroenas nitidissimus - Mauritius Blue Pigeon". National Museums Scotland. Retrieved 21 July 2021.
  15. ^ Rothschild, W. (1907). Extinct Birds. London: Hutchinson & Co. p. 163.
  16. ^ Goodwin, D. (1983). Pigeons and Doves of the World. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press. p. 227.
  17. doi:10.1111/j.1474-919X.1883.tb07172.x
    .
  18. ^ Cheke & Hume 2008, p. 67.
  19. PMID 17661233
    .
  20. PMID 11872833
    .
  21. ^ a b c d e Hume 2011, p. 35.
  22. S2CID 226613585
    .
  23. ^ a b c d e f Hume & Walters 2012, pp. 159–160.
  24. ^ a b Hume 2011, p. 36.
  25. ^
    S2CID 84473440
    .
  26. ^ a b c d Hume 2011, p. 37.
  27. doi:10.1017/S0030605300020457
    .
  28. doi:10.1017/S0030605300012643
    .
  29. ^ Cheke & Hume 2008, pp. 49–52.
  30. ^ Cheke, A. S. (2009), "Data sources for 18th century French encyclopaedists – what they used and omitted: evidence of data lost and ignored from the Mascarene Islands, Indian Ocean", Journal of the National Museum (Prague), Natural History Series, 177: 96
  31. ISBN 978-0486218694
    .
  32. ^ Cheke & Hume 2008, p. 124.
  33. ^ a b c Hume 2011, p. 38.

Sources

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