Passenger Pigeon — Eastern Mourning Dove.
Reproduction of a painting by Louis Agassiz Fuertes. In: Portraits of New England Birds, Drawn in Color by Louis Agassiz Fuertes and Allen Brooks, for “Birds of Massachusetts and Other New England States” by Edward Howe Forbush (Boston, 1932).
Fuertes’ plate for the 1932 edition of Portraits of New England Birds shows male, female, and juvenile passenger pigeons even though the species had been extinct for eighteen years. Unverified claims of sightings of the pigeons continued for decades, as did fanciful theories that suggested the birds had migrated to South America and changed the color of their plumage there. Many of the birds collected and thought to be passenger pigeons after 1914 were determined on inspection to be mourning doves that had been mistaken for the larger and lost species.