Columbidae Leach 1820

Columbidae

Zenaida auriculata (ND): out of the four subspecies that occur in Brazil, Z. a. noronha occurs in the semiarid Caatinga in the Northeast region and presents large population variations because of flock gatherings during the rainy season while searching for breeding sites, where it forms breeding colonies with thousands of nests (Azevedo-Júnior & Antas, 1990). It seems to breed itinerantly in the Northeast (Bucher, 1982), which is corroborated by banding data from up to 2005 (SNA, 2016). According to this pattern, the first colonies appeared around the middle of the São Francisco River in Bahia (BA) between February and March. The species appeared soon after in western Pernambuco (PE),southern CE and southwestern Piauí (PI) and then, between May and June, in southern central PE (Sertão do Pajeú), Seridó region (on the border between PB and RN) and RN (Azevedo-Júnior & Antas, 1990). However, there is an annual change in total precipitation in the Caatinga that may favor the opportunist occurrence of colonies in places they do not usually occur in years of irregular precipitation (Azevedo-Júnior & Antas,1990).The species has been classified as migratory (except for in Fernando de Noronha/PE, where it is resident) because it moves in response to rain movements in the Caatinga (Antas, 1987; Azevedo-Júnior & Antas, 1990; Souza et al., 2007), slowly flying from the southwest to the northeast (Nimer, 1977). However, Sick (1983) states that it is not every year that this species gathers by the thousands in the Northeast, and this, when associated to the fact that it can be observed in the Northeast during the entire year (WikiAves, 2016) without a clear seasonal population fluctuation, conflicts with its classification as migratory.For this reason,the species is here classified as not defined.