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ZEISS DTI thermal imaging cameras. For more discoveries at night, and during the day.

Green Imperial, Pied Imperial and unknown Pigeon Indonesia (1 Viewer)

antshrike69 said:
Any chance of a link anyone to the captive Silvery photos? The Yahoo group thread which holds the original message regarding these lacks attachments as far as I can see (maybe because I'm not a group member?)
Just interested to see some good pictures of this enigmatic species.
Click to expand...

Yahoo groups don't save attachments. The photos are far from perfect (as noted earlier, I often get the feeling that the photos by Crimson Lam are screen-caps from videos). One of them is here:

http://www.internationaldovesociety.com/SeedSpecies/SilveryWoodPigeon.htm

The photo is rather dark, and I suspect the non-black sections of the plumage were lighter than they appear (to quote Crimson Lam in the earlier Yahoo message: "pale-grey white"). As the photo size is modified on the above page, a direct link to the photo shows the original size without the small distortion:

http://www.internationaldovesociety.com/Seedeaterspics/Asia/Misc Asia/silvery.jpg

If needed (PM me), I can forward the 2nd photo showing a single bird more or less head-on (it appears whiter than the previous, but is perched in direct light), but if anything it is of a lower quality than the above. I don't know of a link with it that is accessible to all.

As a brief final note the photo on the above link has also been used on various Czech and Russian sites, and it appears some have been mislead to thinking it originated there (e.g. http://www.ornithomedia.com/magazine/mag_art210_2.htm). These sites have been around for years, but fortunately appear to be on the fall. Basically, if you have photographed a "high profile" bird where very few photos are around there's a fair chance one of these Czech or Russian sites at some point have used it (they typically appear to be some type of illustrated bird lists). They seem to have little regard for copyrights, and being in Czech or Russian most people in Western Europe/North America wouldn't even know how to contact the people running them. Consequently, unless actually starting a big case with an international lawyer and all, most have no real chance of having their photo removed from one of these pages.
 
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Cheers for that Rasmus. Interesting photo, although a little out of place on a site full of colour forms of domestic dove species!
 
Seems like a lively discussion going on here...just to add on to some of the observations...at least 3 of the specimens of silvery showed to varying extents of brownish to cream washes on their vent (in contrast to the overall bluish-grey) and interestingly has a similar fade effect to the nominate bicolors i looked at...would look at more of the bicolors in the coming week, there are stacks of them lying around!

Ding Li
 
Rasmus,
I've written to Crimson since last week but he hasn't replied...lets hope he does and so that more constructive photos can surface!

Ding Li
 
Rasmus Boegh said:
Indeed, even if we did assume that bird 4 was "larger-eyed" than a typical Pied, what would be most likely? An aberrant (e.g. eye-disease or injury - both of which are fairly frequent in Columbidae) individual of a species that is locally common or a species with no confirmed recent records on an island where it, even historically, never has been recorded? .
Click to expand...

I'm not sure how many birders have visited the islands west of Sumatra, indeed Filip Verbelen's recent photos of the three Otus species are the first I can remember. It would not be surprising - to me at least - if silvery woodpigeon was still present on this island chain. I'm not sure about the level of collecting effort on the various islands but if this is a small island wanderer it could easily be missed with low sampling effort (on any one island).

cheers, alan
 
lewis20126 said:
I'm not sure about the level of collecting effort on the various islands but if this is a small island wanderer it could easily be missed with low sampling effort (on any one island).
Click to expand...

Overall the islands are fairly well represented in collections. However, as I also stated in an earlier comment, I would not exclude the possibility that Silvery might have occurred or even still occur there. Purely speculative, but I'm reasonably confident this is a species still "out there" somewhere, perhaps most likely on some of the smaller islands south of Sumatra or west of Borneo (where there appear to have been even fewer recent visitors with an ornithological agenda than to the islands west of Sumatra). Should someone feel tempted going for the latter, it is worth noting that the status of the monkey Presbytis rubicunda carimatae from Karimata Island also could use an update. However, even if the Silvery is "out there", it is certainly unlikely to be in populations high enough to change is status from very seriously endangered - even with a confirmed rediscovery, I doubt it will be another "Clytoctantes experiance".

lewis20126 said:
Do the different PIP taxa have dfferent sized eyes?
Click to expand...

Don't know, and I'm not sure anyone know, as it probably would require measurements of a large number of wild live birds from several widely separated localities (as I'm sure you know, bare parts and things like eyes are typically "problematic" in specimens - the very reason so many species commonly are illustrated/described with incorrect colours of irides, legs, etc). However, the exact subspecies was of some importance due to your comments on the bill, as the nominate Pied is the only member of the entire group where the bill is not largely yellowish. That said, there are some strange things going on with Pied/Torresian in West Papua/Moluccas, but that's an entirely different discussion.
 
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Personally, i find it very hard to base a species distribution, let alone an enigmatic species on a handful of historical localities and even so, mostly which are hardly sampled. Almost every southeast asian island that i ever worked or birded on had a few species added to the list each time it was surveyed, So i would think that the likelihood of occurence of silvery on any of the Mentawai-Banyak group of islands to be extremely high, even if it has not been recorded there in the past.

Ding Li
 
Ding Li,

I entirely agree - it was only a few years ago that Pete Morris found Javan Plovers ("endemic to Java"?) on....Sulawesi! It is not too difficult to add new species to country / island lists in this part of the world. Neil Bostock and I found an Australian Avocet at Mearuke, West Papua in 1992 (which I don't think has yet been put in print!) which is / was an "Australian endemic".

Regards

Alan
 
Just a casual update...I've gone through the underwing pattern of all our silverys. All of them do not have complete black secondaries when seen from the bottom, half to as much as 3 quarters of it is greyish...so if seen from the bottom, the black fringe is actually very different and much narrower when compared to the Pied Imperials which i compared 10 nominate specimens from Karimun, Natunas, Mentawai and Mantanani. Suggests that the bird posted earlier by Mark with the narrow black fringe on the lower wing was most probably silvery, as opposed to pied imperial

Ding Li
 
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Hi guys,
As promised...some photos of the museum specimens. Here's the first of a series.

Ding Li
 

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Dong Li

Good work! - I think you are on to something here. Compare your pictures with my very crude edit of the underwing of the bird. I think it is clear, crudely speaking that the area enclosed by the polygon on my picture shoukld be black on PIP and whitish (m,ore complex than that given the inner / outer web differences) on S(W)P.

As you have said prevuiously I think the photo accords with the wing pattern of Silvery and not PIP.

Keep up the good work.

Alan
 

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If you are interested, the conclusion of Dong Li's work is here:

Bulletin of the British Ornithologists' Club
Vol. 129, (September) 2009.
LEE, M. T., DONG, D. L. & ONG, T. P. A photographic record of Silvery Pigeon Columba argentina from the Mentawai Islands, Indonesia, with notes on identification, distribution and conservation

The big woodie flies!

cheers, alan
 
lewis20126 said:
If you are interested, the conclusion of Dong Li's work is here:

Bulletin of the British Ornithologists' Club
Vol. 129, (September) 2009.
LEE, M. T., DONG, D. L. & ONG, T. P. A photographic record of Silvery Pigeon Columba argentina from the Mentawai Islands, Indonesia, with notes on identification, distribution and conservation

The big woodie flies!

cheers, alan
Click to expand...

Alan

Do you know if there anyway of getting hold of a PDF of this paper?

Thanks

Dave
 
Here is a similar article:

Li, D, Y (2009): Notes on the status and identification of the Silvery Pigeon Columba argentina. BirdingAsia 11.
 
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