Home Ranges of Two Populations of Urban-Nesting White-Winged Doves (Zenaida Asiatica) in Texas (Report‪)‬

White-winged doves (Zenaida asiatica) historically have been restricted in their nesting range in Texas from Val Verde County in the west to Bee County in the east, and south to the Mexican border (Cottam and Trefethen, 1968; Olberhoser, 1974; George et al., 1994). In these areas, the majority of breeding individuals occurred in a four-county (Willacy, Cameron, Hidalgo, and Starr) region, commonly referred to as the lower Rio Grande Valley at the southern tip of Texas (Small et al., 2006a). The majority of nesting white-winged doves occurred in dense riparian habitat of the Tamaulipian biotic province in the lower Rio Grande Valley (Blair, 1950; Hayslette et al., 1996). in these riparian areas, white-winged doves nested in large colonies becoming more solitary in drier, upland scrub (Cottam and Trefethen, 1968). While reliable historical estimates of size of populations are not available for all of Texas, estimates for the lower Rio Grande Valley were 2-12,000,000 individuals (Sennett, 1878, 1879; Smith, 1910; Wetmore, 1920; Marsh and saunders, 1942).