Choiseul pigeon was endemic to the island of Choiseul in the Solomon Islands. The adult pigeon was largely blue-grey, with a buffy orange belly and a distinctive slaty-blue crest. It is believed to have laid a single egg in an unlined depression in the ground. indigenous peoples reported that the species was driven to extinction due to the introduction of cats.
About Choiseul pigeon in brief
Choiseul pigeon was endemic to the island of Choiseul in the Solomon Islands. The last confirmed sighting was in 1904. The adult pigeon was largely blue-grey, with a buffy orange belly and a distinctive slaty-blue crest. It is believed to have laid a single egg in an unlined depression in the ground. The indigenous peoples reported that the species was driven to extinction due to the introduction of cats. Five skins and a partial skeleton are kept in the American Museum of Natural History, while a single skin and the egg are kept at the Natural History Museum at Tring. It has been suggested that it was a link between the thick-billed ground pigeon and the crowned pigeons. However, other sources argue that it may not have been closely related to the crowned pigeons as its crest was quite different. It was described by Walter Rothschild in 1904 on the basis of six skins—three male and three female—and an egg collected by Albert Stewart Meek earlier that year. Despite many subsequent searches, the bird has not been definitively reported since. The species is considered extinct and the last unconfirmed report of a ChoiseUL pigeon was in the early 1940s, and the species is now thought to be in the Gourinae subfamily, along with the Groura pigeons, the dodo, the Rodrigues solitaire, and others.
It lived in lowland forests, particularly in coastal swampy areas that lacked mangroves. It roosted in pairs or small groups of three or four in small shrubs and was reportedly very tame, allowing hunters to pick it up off its roost. The male wing of the male was about 31 cm long, the female was 60 mm, the tail was 180–190mm, and the tarsus was 100 mm and the culmenus was 60mm. This pigeon had a rounded, hairy crown, like the crown, that had a distinctive texture like the hairy crown of a pigeon. It had a blue frontal shield surrounded by black feathers and a bicoloured beak. The wings were brown and the short tail was a blackish purple. The bird was described as having a beautiful rising and falling whistling call, and it was said to have a beautiful singing voice. The female wing was 195mm long and the male wing was about 195mm.
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This page is based on the article Choiseul pigeon published in Wikipedia (as of Nov. 06, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
