Pigeon And Dove Families

This group gathers taxon/Bird Families subcategory members that are themselves bird families belonging to the order Columbiformes, the pigeons and doves, a cosmopolitan group found on every continent except Antarctica and represented by both familiar urban species and a considerable number of more range-restricted, often threatened island and forest species. Every family gathered here shares a distinctive drinking method, sucking up water continuously through the bill without needing to tip the head back the way most other birds must, and produces a nutrient-rich secretion from the crop, called crop milk, that both parents feed to their chicks in the early days after hatching, a form of parental care found in only a small number of unrelated bird groups. Several island-dwelling pigeon and dove species have historically been especially vulnerable to introduced predators and habitat loss, a pattern that includes some of the best-documented bird extinctions in recorded history.