Day 386#: Purple-Winged Ground Dove
Today's animal of the day is the Purple-Winged Ground Dove (Paraclaravis geoffroyi)!
Photo credit: Carlos Keller
This critically endangered species of dove is believed to inhabit the Atlantic Forest, a large region that consists of broadleaf rainforests along the Atlantic coast of South America. It has historically been observed in parts of southeastern Brazil, eastern Paraguay, and in the Misiones province of northeastern Argentina. However, the species hasn't been seen in years, and it's feared that these rare birds may have already gone extinct.
Image credit: Martin Elliott
These pigeons were specialists that relied on the mass fruiting events of two very specific species of bamboo, Guadua chacoensis and Guadua trinii. Groves of these bamboos would take turns simultaneously flowering, producing seeds, and then dying, and the purple-winged ground doves would travel from grove to grove to feed on all the seeds. By only feeding on these two specific species of bamboo, they avoided competing with other species of seed-eating birds, such as their close relative the maroon-chested ground dove, which also feeds on bamboo seeds but only those of Andean bamboo. However, it also made them totally reliant on the bamboo, and as a result, they were always pretty rare outside of groves that were undergoing mass seeding events.
Photo credit: Luiz Claudio Marigo
This specialization made these doves extremely vulnerable to deforestation. More than 85% of the Atlantic Forest region has been cut down by humans to use as lumber, firewood, or to turn into farms and pasture lands. This has caused the extinction of countless species of plants, animals, and probably many other types of organisms, including those that hadn't even been discovered yet. Because the purple-winged ground dove filled such a specific niche, it likely was hit harder by the loss of its forest compared to species with more generalist lifestyles. There have been no verifiable sightings of this species since 1985, though they haven't been declared extinct yet, since there have been a couple of unconfirmed sightings, with the latest one being in 2017 in Argentina. Though even if they are still alive somewhere in the rainforest, it's feared that their population might be too small for the species to last much longer.
Image credit: Coenraad Jacob Temminck
Ok, so this part actually makes me really mad. While rarely seen in the wild, there were actually over 150 individuals held in captivity by various aviaries and private owners. These captive individuals could have been used to create a captive breeding population, like what was done with the Spix's macaw. However, the Brazilian government ended up changing its laws regarding keeping these birds in the 1980s, which forced keepers to register their birds or release them back into the wild. Any keepers who didn't do this had their birds taken and sent to a government facility that didn't really know how to care for them, so most ended up dying or being released without any sort of tracking device since it wasn't realized how endangered they were at the time. The last captive individuals died sometime in the mid-1990s, and with them went our best chance at saving this species. Honestly, so infuriating! Now, the best thing we can do to save them is to put protections on the remaining patches of forests with guadua bamboo, just in case there's still a small wild population hanging on out there.
