Mauritius Blue Pigeon - Taxonomy and Etymology

Taxonomy and Etymology

The first record of the Mauritius Blue Pigeon is two sketches in the 1601–1603 journal of the Dutch ship Gelderland. The birds appear to have been freshly killed or stunned. The drawings were made by the Dutch artist Joris Joostensz Laerle on Mauritius, but were not published until 1969. François Cauche in 1651 briefly mentions "white, black and red turtle doves", encountered in 1638, which is thought to be the first unequivocal mention of the bird. The next account is that of Joseph François Charpentier de Cossigny in the mid-1700s.

Pierre Sonnerat brought the bird to the attention of ornithologists in 1782, calling it Pigeon Hollandais (Dutch Pigeon), a French vernacular name that derives from its white, dark blue and red colouration, which reminded Sonnerat of the Dutch flag. He had collected two specimens during a voyage in 1774. These syntype specimens were deposited in the Muséum national d'Histoire naturelle in Paris, where they were later damaged by sulphuric acid fumes; by 1893, only one of them still existed. Since Sonnerat named and described them in French, the scientific naming of the bird was left to Giovanni Antonio Scopoli, who did not observe a specimen himself, but latinised Sonnerat's description. He named the bird Columba nitidissima, which means "most brilliant pigeon". When Johann Friedrich Gmelin redescribed the bird with the species name franciae ("of France") in 1789, he referred to the now-familiar tricolour which had just been flown for the first time. Pierre Joseph Bonnaterre used the name batavica ("the Dutch one") in his redescription in 1790. Another skin arrived at the Paris museum in 1800, collected by Colonel M. Mathieu for Louis Dufresne. It was sold in 1819 among other items, was sent to Edinburgh, and is now in the National Museum of Scotland. It was not identified as a Mauritius Blue Pigeon until Alfred Newton saw it in 1879. The last specimen recorded was shot in Savanne in 1826 and given to Julien Desjardins, founder of the Mauritius Natural History Museum in Port Louis, where it is still located, though in poor condition. Only these three taxidermic specimens still survive.

In 1840 George Robert Gray named a new genus, Alectroenas, for the Mauritius Blue Pigeon; alektruon in Greek means domestic cock, and oinas means dove. Alectroenas nitidissima is the type species of the genus, which includes all blue pigeons.

Subfossil remains of the Mauritius Blue Pigeon were collected in the Mare aux Songes swamp by Théodore Sauzier in 1889. More were collected by Etienne Thirioux around 1900. They are thought to have been found near Le Pouce and Plaine des Roches.