Doves Returning Home to Tiny 'Mexican Galapagos' Loretta Williams - All Things Considered
go to original February 3, 2017

In the coming year, scientists are hoping to reintroduce the Socorro dove to Socorro Island, a place where the bird has died out.

Socorro, the ancestral home of the dove, is part of an island group off the west coast of Mexico nicknamed the Mexican Galapagos.

In the 1920s, the California Academy of Sciences noticed island birds and animals were disappearing fast. So the academy sent an expedition to Socorro with instructions to bring back live doves.

Juan Martinez, a scientist with Mexico's Institute of Ecology, hiked the same terrain as the researchers a century ago. He said he plans to slowly reintroduce the doves to the wild.

"We're going to camp in that area, where you see the green and the red," Martinez said. "In that area is a heavier forest and is where they found the Socorro doves. That's why all this exercise is helping us find the locations. The best place to bring them back is a similar place where they found them."

The original expedition brought back 17 doves and sent them to zoos and aviaries across the United States and Europe. The plan was to breed them in captivity.

But although they survived at the zoos, they died off on the island.

Read the rest at NPR.org

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