Bird of the Week – Eurasian Collared-Dove

WC has received complaints that flycatchers are boring, and that readers want to see more unusual birds. All right. How about a Eurasian Collared-Dove at Maclaren River on the Denali Highway? If you look at a range map for this species, you’ll see that officially they barely make it into Canada. Yet this Marco Polo among doves turned up in the mountains of interior Alaska. Here it is picking through straw along the road from a dog musher’s winter camping spot. The species was introduced in the Western Hemisphere in the Bahamas in the 1970s, and has explosively expanded its range to…