The Invader: Eurasian Collared-Dove

Texas Fish and Game Unfiltered with Kevin Burke · Oct 15, 2026 · 11m

Fifty Eurasian collared-doves got loose in a Bahamas burglary in 1974. Twenty-five years later they were nesting in Alaska. Starlings needed that long just to reach the Mississippi.

They’re bigger than mourning doves, they breed faster, and a cafeteria study put their diet overlap at 0.95. Hunters assumed that was the end of the story. The actual research did not.

We go through the jump-and-backfill invasion, the 50-percent-a-year western boom, why the competition experiments came back empty, and the risk that actually matters: trichomoniasis and paramyxovirus at crowded feeders.

-Get…