The Doves

In the heat of the day when, as a boy, I lay in bed for my enforced after-lunch 'rest' I would hear the hoo-hoo of the doves in the frangipani trees along the side of the house, their soft call laid across the scream of the crickets. At school in England I would think of them as African doves but in fact they weren't, that species being confined to the Sahel areas to the south of the Sahara desert; they were more likely to have been ring-necked or Cape doves.

These days, in a much colder climate, it is this dove I hear, the Eurasian collared dove, a very successful species which has spread across the lands of the northern hemisphere and, somehow, crossed the Atlantic to the Americas. It doesn't look much different from the ring-necked dove nor, as far as I can remember, does its call differ so, when I hear it, I am transported back to Africa.