Repeat Performance

And the Eurasian Collard Dove makes it's second appearance in our journey through time. These birds are common in Europe and Asia - hence the Eurasian part of their name...but they are fairly new to North America, sneaking into Florida in 1982. This summer is the first time we've ever seen this dove and I'm sure we will see more of them. This one is very wary of people and we had to sit very still to get it to come back to the yard. I think it was after the water, but we made it too nervous, and off it went.

So, we had that problem with the car which is fixed, then the phone, which we've had for quite a while died today. We had two phones that came together, so the main one is in the computer room with the outlet and the handset one was in the living room. Sometime in the last few months, the second phone disappeared. We have looked but unable to locate it. Our phone was too old to have the "handset locater" feature and so it has remained lost. So it was time to get new phones anyway. So, off I went to Best Buy and came home with an AT&T phone because the clerk told me it had the largest phone speaker...I'm sure he tells all the old people that. Well, it was a good suggestion so I bought it. And it does have excellent sound quality. I noticed a huge improvement when I talked to my aunt.

Then Bill lost a lens out of his eyeglasses, but it didn't break and he got it back in okay. I hope. We don't need the expense of new glasses for him right now. He was painting our little deck we have out back, next to the fence. We picked out the color last night and there are 75 different colors to choose from, or so it seemed, and I am not at all thrilled with the color that we ended up with. It certainly didn't look pinkish brown in the color chart, but that's what we got. Too late now. It's a mixed paint and not returnable. These things happen. I will ignore it.

Hope everything is hunky dory in your part of the world.


The collared dove is not migratory, but is strongly dispersive. Over the last century, it has been one of the great colonisers of the bird world. Its original range at the end of the 19th century was warm temperate and subtropical Asia from Turkey east to southern China and south through India to Sri Lanka. In 1838 it was reported in Bulgaria, but not until the 20th century did it expand across Europe, appearing in parts of the Balkans between 1900–1920, and then spreading rapidly northwest, reaching Germany in 1945, Great Britain by 1953 (breeding for the first time in 1956), Ireland in 1959, and the Faroe Islands in the early 1970s. Subsequent spread was 'sideways' from this fast northwest spread, reaching northeast to north of the Arctic Circle in Norway and east to the Ural Mountains in Russia, and southwest to the Canary Islands and northern Africa from Morocco to Egypt, by the end of the 20th century. In the east of its range, it has also spread northeast to most of central and northern China, and locally (probably introduced) in Japan.[2][3][4][6] It has also reached Iceland as a vagrant (41 records up to 2006), but has not colonised successfully there.[8]

There are two subspecies, Streptopelia decaocto decaocto in most of the range (including all of the 20th century colonisations), and Streptopelia decaocto xanthocyclus in the southeast of the range from Burma east to southern China. The latter differs in having yellow skin around the eye (white in the nominate subspecies).[6] Two other subspecies formerly sometimes accepted, Streptopelia decaocto stoliczkae from Turkestan in central Asia, and Streptopelia decaocto intercedens from southern India and Sri Lanka,[4] are now considered synonyms of S. d. decaocto.[6]