Birds Give Up Colorful Feathers for Carefree Island Lifestyle

Island living may call to mind vivid flowering vines and colorful plumage. But in reality, birds on islands around the world have evolved less-colorful feathers than their mainland relatives. Their drab, simple patterns are only the latest evidence that island evolution is kind of weird. Claire Doutrelant, an ecologist at France's Centre d'Ecologie Fonctionnelle et Evolutive, and her coauthors studied 116 pairs of bird species, or 232 species in all. Each pair included an island bird and its closest relative that lives on the mainland and breeds at a similar latitude. For example, one pair was made up of the Hawaiian nene and the Canada goose. You can see another pair at the top of this post. On the left is Ptilinopus regina, the rose-crowned fruit dove. It lives on mainland Australia. On the right is its cousin Ptilinopus regina, the gray-green fruit dove, from the island of Tahiti. In ...