“The Oaklander was unable to locate the pigeon for comment”

  • Successful_Try543@feddit.org
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    4
    ·
    edit-2
    9 days ago

    The rock doves living in cities today likely are feral descendants of domesticated rock doves. Their ‘fancyness’ wasn’t really useful for surviving and disappeared.

    • tyler@programming.dev
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      9 days ago

      Feral descendants that bred with wild rock doves, incredibly unlikely to still be domesticated.

      • Fondots@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        6 days ago

        In much, maybe most of the current range, there were never truly wild rock doves for them to breed with, only feral domesticated pigeons.

        I’m sure that there have been some cases of true wild rock doves accidentally or intentionally introduced to some areas, but in many more cases they’re just descended from domesticated pigeons that got loose or were released. Over many generations, sure, many of them have lost a lot of the domesticated traits that they were bred for but aren’t beneficial to life in the wild, but they’re still genetically distinct from truly wild rock doves (although it can get murky where to draw the line, because feral pigeons have also been interbreeding with wild birds in their native range for probably as long as they’ve been domesticated)