Talk:Dove
From Academic Kids
I think we need to split this one. The taxobox is getting out of control! What happens when we get to the really big families - parrots or hummingbirds, for example? Unfortunately, there seem to be no sensible sub-groups, or so my quick recourse to HANZAB suggests. Maybe we are stuck with it as is. Or a geographical split? Nope, that could get messy too. Just plug in more text to balance it, I guess. Tannin
- I agree, It's also 90 years out-of-date. I moved it here from turtle-dove, a biblical article. I'll sort it when I get time, but I'm going birding soon jimfbleak
- I retract out-of-date, but the long list of genera includes a number that don't appear in my 1980 world checklist. I've nothing else to check with on an overall basis. I can't see any sensible way of splitting the topic that would be clear to non-birders, but it will have to be done eventually. The good news is that most of the genera have only a few members, only three or four have more than 5 species. jimfbleak 17:21 Apr 18, 2003 (UTC)
- I've re-ordered it to the genus order in Lynx HBW, and put in their subfamilies as sections to make future editing easier - MPF 12:32, 3 Feb 2004 (UTC)
I'm a little confused. Pigeon redirects to Dove and from what I gather the pigeon is also called the Rock Dove. I think it would be better if a knowledgable individual could replace Pigeon with a short article explaining what species are usually considered pigeons. ThereIsNoSteve 09:00, 21 Sep 2003 (UTC)
The reason that pigeon redirects to Dove is that the terms are effectively interchangeable, and there is no particular biological logic to it. The domesticated form of the wild Rock Dove is called the Feral Pigeon (explained under that article). The closest relatives of the Rock Dove in Europe are the Stock Dove and the Woodpigeon. It makes more sense to keep them all together, and at least that means that material won't be duplicated. Jim
Yep - it is hopeless trying to distinguish pigeons and doves. The origin of the confusion is that pigeon is a French-derived word, and described the meat, while dove is a Germanic word (compare German Taube, which would have been something like Doof before the Hochdeutsch sound shifts got at it, long after Anglo-Saxon had split off - probably still is in Dutch) describing the live bird. And the reason is medieval English history - the meat was eaten by French-speaking Normans and the animals were looked after by Anglo-Saxon-speaking Saxons. It's exactly the same as beef/cow, pork/swine, mutton/sheep, venison/deer, and poultry/hen. So the inhabitants of a dove cot were served up as pigeon. And somewhere round the history of finding and naming new species, some of them got called doves and some got called pigeons, and that's all there is to it. seglea 18:25, 3 Feb 2004 (UTC)
- Duif in Dutch! - MPF 23:24, 24 Feb 2004 (UTC)
- Further on the pigeon/dove lack of difference, there's a nice little a spoof rhyme in French on the representation of the Holy Spirit by a dove, which translates well into English:
- The three basics of Religion,
- The Father, the Son, and the Pigeon (Anon., trad.) - MPF 23:24, 24 Feb 2004 (UTC)
