The pigeon guillemot is a species of bird in the auk family, Alcidae. One of three species in the genus Cepphus, it is most closely related to the spectacled Guillemot. This seabird is found on North Pacific coastal waters, from Siberia through Alaska to California. Threats to this bird include climate change, introduced mammalian predators, and oil spills.
About Pigeon guillemot in brief
The pigeon guillemot is a species of bird in the auk family, Alcidae. One of three species in the genus Cepphus, it is most closely related to the spectacled Guillemot. There are five subspecies, when in breeding plumage, are dark brown with a black iridescent sheen and a distinctive wing patch broken by a brown-black wedge. This seabird is found on North Pacific coastal waters, from Siberia through Alaska to California. It is considered to be a least concern species by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. Threats to this bird include climate change, introduced mammalian predators, and oil spills. It feeds on small fish and marine invertebrates, mostly near the sea floor, that it catches by pursuit diving. Pigeon guillemots are monogamous breeders, nesting in small colonies close to the shore. They defend small territories around a nesting cavity, in which they lay one or two eggs. Both parents incubate the eggs and feed the chicks. After leaving the nest the young bird is completely independent of its parents. In the winter, some birds move slightly south in the northernmost part of their range in response to advancing ice and migrate slightly north in the southern part of the range, generally preferring more sheltered areas. In winter, the upperparts are black, often black fridescent, often with black fringes under the underparts, giving a scalloped appearance.
The summer plumage of the adult is mostly brown, mostly dark brown, with a white wing patch with a brown sheen. The long bill is black, as are the claws. The legs, feet, and inside of the mouth are red. It closely resembles the blackguillemot, which is slightly smaller and lacks the dark wing wedge present in the pigeon guillesmot. Combined, the two form a superspecies. Both sexes are alike in appearance and mass, except for Californian birds where females were found to have larger summer or breeding bills than males. The name of the subspecies kaiurka is derived from the Russian kachurka, meaning “petrel” The trinomial epithet of C. eureka is from the Greek heurēka, which means “I have found it” The pigeon guillot is a medium-sized, 30cm to 30cm in length and 450 to 550 cm in weight. It was described in 1811 by Peter Simon Pallas in the second volume of his Zoographia Rosso-Asiatica. The common name for the related black guille MOT was Greenland dove. The subspecies Snowi is dedicated to Captain Henry James Snow, a British seaman and hunter. Snowi is derived from the Greek adiantos, meaning ‘eureka, the state of California, which is where I have found the pigeon guillot’ to breed.
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This page is based on the article Pigeon guillemot published in Wikipedia (as of Nov. 07, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
