LogFAQs > #972622589

Doves and pigeons are the same thing:

Whats the actual scientific difference between doves and pigeons?
As it turns out, there isnt one. Paul Sweet, the collection manager for the department of ornithology at the American Museum of Natural History, said the difference is more linguistic than taxonomic.
The word dove is a word that came into English from the more Nordic languages, whereas pigeon came into English from French, Sweet told Mental Floss in 2018.
Both dove and pigeon refer to the 300-plus species of birds in the Columbidae family, Sweet said. Theres no difference between a pigeon and a dove in scientific nomenclature, but colloquial English tends to categorize them by size. Something called a dove is generally smaller than something called a pigeon, but thats not always the case. A common pigeon, for example, is called both a rock dove and a rock pigeon.