Blue-eyed Ground Dove

BirdBrazil

16 May

Columbina cyanopis

The blue-eyed ground dove was believed to be extinct for 75 years — until twelve were rediscovered in the Brazilian Cerrado in 2015. Current population estimates range from over 250 wild individuals to as few as 16.

Columbina

Throughout the Americas, dainty ground doves waddle among dry grasses, pecking here and there for seeds. They form small foraging flocks or large congregations over 200 strong, often comprised of doves from different species: common and ruddy ground doves, plain-breasted ground doves, and Inca doves. Family sticks together, and while these doves are, indeed, all part of the same family — Columbidae, the pigeons and doves — they're closer than that — all of them are in the same genus, Columbina, too.¹ From the common ground dove in the southern United States to the Inca dove in Costa Rica and the Picuí ground dove in central Argentina, the Columbina doves, of which there are nine species, span much of the New World.

Lazarus of the Cerrado

Across the grassy savannahs of the southwestern Brazilian Cerrado, between the scattered shrubs and palmettos, mill about ruddy and plain-breasted ground doves. Their flocks are made up of earthy males and grey females, all around 16 centimetres (6.3 in) long. The two species are visually distinguishable only by a slight difference in hue — the ruddy ground dove is more ruddy — and by their wing spots — one species has black spots and the other has spots so dark blue as to be nearly black.

If you happened to be trekking through this remote part of Brazil, walking through the flocks of ground doves and watching them flush from underfoot, showing off their rusty wing patches as they take to the air, you might have seen, if you were very lucky, a few aberrant members among their ranks. Now, I'm not talking about some bright, rainbow-coloured individuals; these outliers have pale bodies and underbellies, with cinnamon coloured heads, and tail feathers tipped grey like paint brushes. Their wing spots shimmer a clear, iridescent blue — the same colour as their vivid, dreamlike eyes.

To recognise these odd doves for what they were, you'd have needed a keen eye and solid knowledge of the Columbidae (pigeons and doves), and not just the living ones. And, if you'd made this observation before 2015 and reported it to BirdLife International in Brazil, you'd have been responsible for the resurrection of an entire species. That's what Brazilian ornithologist Rafael Bessa did when he encountered eleven such birds, completely by chance — noticing their "qwuk qwuk qwuk qwuk…." calls — while conducting research in the Brazilian Cerrado. Prior to 2015, not a single one had been seen for 75 years. The blue-eyed ground dove, the Lazarus of the Cerrado, had been resurrected.²

A Doomed Resurrection?

This discovery, or re-discovery, of the blue-eyed ground dove happened to the east of the species' previously known range, and, since then, we've only found it in three locations — open savannah and campo grassland habitats, where it probably feeds on seeds and insects — and its fragmented range is estimated to cover a tiny 1,200 km² (745 mi²). Some speculate that increased agricultural activity in the Cerrado led to this ground dove's false extinction and very real decline, but the real cause behind its disappearance is still largely a mystery.

After its rediscovery, the blue-eyed ground dove was reclassified from 'extinct' to 'critically endangered'. It's very possible that this dove was "resurrected" only to die again — for real, this time. The IUCN and BirdLife DataZone estimate that its population lies somewhere between 50 and 250 mature individuals. EDGE of Existence,³ a conservation programme under the Zoological Society of London, reports that 31 blue-eyed ground-doves are known to live in the wild. The American Bird Conservancy estimates just 16 individuals surviving in the wild.

Egg Theft, Pigeon Milk, and 2-gram Chicks

A captive breeding population acts as a sort of insurance policy for an endangered species. The trouble is, the more endangered the species — the fewer individuals are left in the wild — the riskier it is to capture and bring them into captivity; the stress of capture and its potential health consequences are just too great. It's too great a risk with a population potentially as low as 16 doves. However, researchers have been monitoring two active nests, and from those nests, they removed two eggs. This seems a dubious conservation tactic, at least ethically so, but it's been employed before to save another bird species from the brink of extinction.

The Mauritius kestrel, endemic to the African island east of Madagascar, was down to just 4 known individuals in the 1970s. A conservation biologist named Carl Jones set out to save the rarest raptor in the world. He began removing eggs from wild kestrel nests, prompting the mother to lay a second clutch, while he raised the first in captivity. The number of mature Mauritius kestrels is now estimated between 140 and 170 individuals.

The hope is to pull the same "double-clutch" trick with the blue-eyed ground dove. Getting the eggs isn't difficult if you know where they are — certainly easier than scaling cliffs for kestrel eggs — but rearing young doves in captivity proves harder than rearing raptors. While a growing kestrel thrives on a carnivorous smorgasbord of insects, worms, voles, and other birds, a newborn dove requires milk — not cow's milk, or mammal milk of any kind, but pigeon milk.

A domestic pigeon feeding its chick crop milk.

Pigeon milk, more properly known as crop milk, is produced by both males and females in an organ called the crop and is then regurgitated to feed their chicks. Like mammalian milk, crop milk provides the young with a high amount of protein, fat, and minerals, and a pigeon chick relies completely on crop milk for the first few days of its life. Without crop milk from a parent, it would be impossible to keep newborn pigeons and doves alive through their first few days in captivity, that is, until we developed a "pigeon baby formula" — an artificial version of crop milk.⁴

In 2022, two precious eggs were brought to a facility near the blue-eyed ground dove's habitat by conservationists from SAVE Brazil and Parque das Aves. A day later, they began to hatch. From them emerged two minuscule chicks; both exactly 2.14 grams, not much more than the weight of a penny, and about the size of a thumbnail. With a modified pipette full of artificial crop milk, Joe Wood — a world expert on hand-rearing pigeons — got the two tiny chicks through their first, and most vulnerable, two weeks of life. The young doves were then moved to Parque das Aves in southern Brazil, where caretakers watched as they grew into adults, seeing their blue wing spots grow in and their eyes turn sapphire.

A blue-eyed ground dove chick hatched in Chester Zoo on May of 2024.

Crop milk being fed to the tiny newborn chick.

These two chicks, hopefully the first of many to be successfully reared in captivity, are now adults. Every new blue-eyed ground dove that's found, every chick that hatches in the wild or captivity, represents several percentage points of the species. According to one population estimate, the two birds in Parque das Aves alone represent 12% of their species and, as their adoptive father Joe Wood has said, "12 percent of an entire species is quite a thing to hold in two hands."

“A Low Degree of Interest”

On the Cornell Lab of Ornithology's website, the opening line about the blue-eyed ground dove states that: "Few birds have so inexplicably slipped from the ornithological ‘radar’ as the Blue-eyed Ground-Dove." It's difficult to anticipate threats to this species if we don't know what those threats could be. The remaining wild population might vanish mysteriously, as it did before, which is why establishing a viable breeding population in captivity is crucial. Maybe we'll chance upon more of these sapphire-eyed doves in the wild, hidden amongst their plain-breasted and ruddy cousins. Cornell's page about this dove also mentions a "low degree of interest amongst most birdwatchers in Columbina ground-doves". It's true that they're not the most glamorous birds. It's also true that the group's most endangered member is its most stunning. The last decade has seen increased scientific and conservation interest in this beautiful, rare bird — monitoring its nests, captive breeding programs, and legal protections.⁵ The more eyes fixed on this dreamy dove, and the more people invested in its survival, the less likely it is to disappear again.

¹ The genus Columbina comprises nine species of small ground doves found throughout the Americas. They forage for seeds on the ground across open habitats like grasslands — typically doing so in small groups, although larger mixed-species flocks are also frequently seen.

In the southern United States, the most common of the Columbina are the common ground dove and the Inca dove. Central America sees flocks of Inca doves, plain-breasted, and ruddy ground doves. While South America hosts eight of the nine species — excluding the Inca dove (somewhat ironically, given the ancient empires' borders) but including the widespread scaled dove and Picuí ground dove, the croaking ground dove (whose range along the continent's western coast actually mirrors the borders of the Inca empire quite accurately), the Ecuadorian ground dove (found mostly in Ecuador), and finally, by far the rarest of the lot, as well as the only threatened species, the blue-eyed ground dove (endemic to SC Brazil).

A common ground dove (*Columbina passerina*).

A ruddy ground dove (*Columbina talpacoti*).

A scaled ground dove (*Columbina squammata*).

A croaking ground dove (*Columbina cruziana*).

² We've re-discovered "extinct" species so many times that we've given them a collective name: Lazarus species (after the biblical Lazarus who was resurrected by Jesus in the New Testament). Other examples include the South Island takahē of New Zealand, presumed extinct for 50 years; the night parrot of Australia, which was "resurrected" after almost 80 years; the La Palma giant lizard of the Canary Islands, which made a comeback after presumably becoming extinct 500 years ago; the Chacoan peccary, which was discovered from fossils and thought to be an extinct species from the Pleistocene (2.6 million to 11,700 years ago) until a living population turned up in the early 1970s; and the coelacanth, an ancient fish believed to have perished during the Cretaceous period, more than 65 million years ago, but was found to be very much alive in 1938.

³ EDGE of Existence focuses on unique, and often overlooked, endangered species — e.g. hirola, hooded grebe, big-headed turtle, purple frog, largetooth sawfish, etc. — and supports conservation movements around the world. I highly recommend exploring their species lists and sharing some of your favourite species with others, or, if you can, donating to their cause.

⁴ Artificial crop milk has also been used to captive-raise pink pigeons, a species endemic to the island of Mauritius, whose numbers were thought to have fallen to just nine individuals in 1991.

⁵ The blue-eyed ground dove is now a protected species under Brazilian law, and so is much of its range.

"In 2018, Brazilian conservation organization SAVE Brazil established a 1,465-acre Blue-eyed Ground-Dove Reserve covering much of the species' range; the rest fell under the protection of a new state park."

**Where Does It Live?**

⛰️ Savannah and grasslands.
📍 Brazilian Cerrado.

‘Critically Endangered’ as of 26 Feb, 2019.

IUCN

Size // Small
Length // 15.5 cm (6.1 in)
Weight // N/A
Activity: Diurnal ☀️
Lifestyle: Social 👥
Lifespan: N/A
Diet: Omnivore
Favorite Food: Small seeds and insects 🐜
Class: Aves
Order: Columbiformes
Family: Columbidae
Genus: Columbina
Species: C. cyanopis

This little ground dove — around 15 centimetres (5.9 inches) long — lives across the grassy savannas of the southwestern Brazilian Cerrado.

Its most distinctive features are its iridescent blue wing markings and deep blue eyes.

The last confirmed sighting of the Blue-eyed Ground-Dove was in 1941. It was presumed extinct until 2015 — for 75 years.

Some speculate that increased agricultural activity in the Cerrado led to the dove's false extinction and very real decline, but the true cause behind its disappearance is still largely a mystery.

After its rediscovery, the blue-eyed ground dove was reclassified from 'extinct' to 'critically endangered'. Its current population estimates are harrowing:
- IUCN and BirdLife DataZone: 50 to 250 mature individuals
- EDGE of Existence: 31 known alive in the wild
- The American Bird Conservancy: 16 alive in the wild
In an effort to save the species, conservationists began raising these doves in captivity. They even developed an artificial version of ‘pigeon milk’ — more properly known as crop milk, a substance produced by both males and females in a pouch called the crop and regurgitated to feed their chicks.
This milk is essential during the first few days of a chick’s life — with blue-eyed ground dove chicks hatching at around 2.14 grams, barely heavier than a penny.