Liverpool Pigeon: Why Tahiti Is Not in the Record

In 1783 John Latham described a dark green pigeon spotted with white, working from two stuffed birds in two London collections. Against the place it came from he wrote three words: native place uncertain. Two hundred and forty-three years, one auction, one bequest, one civic museum, one firebombing and one genome fragment later, that is still the whole of the geographical record. One of the two skins survives, in a drawer in Liverpool. The other is gone.

Silence Index — D-181

Busy

Ranks 92 of 99 scored dossiers — quieter than 7% of the others we have scored. A low score is not a warning; it describes who else will be standing next to you.

How the total is weighted. These are the fixed weights of the four inputs, the same on every dossier — not this place’s scores. We do not publish per-input bars, because the per-input values were never recorded article by article and inventing four plausible numbers that sum to the total would be a fabrication dressed as a chart.

Footfall pressure — visitors measured against the ground that absorbs them30%

Access friction — permits, caps, seasons, boats, weather windows30%

Acoustic floor — how close the nearest engine is20%

Unresolved questions — what the record still cannot settle20%

This dossier was scored before 2 September 2026, when the fourth input became night darkness. It keeps the input it was reasoned with until it is re-scored at its next source re-check; the methodology page records the change.

The index is a desk instrument scored by this publication, not a field measurement. How it is calculated, and where it fails.

What this is built from, and the line it turns on

Nobody from this publication has been to Liverpool for this, has opened the drawer, or has handled the specimen. What follows is assembled from the two 2014 papers that established the bird as a species and reconstructed its ownership history; a 2020 paper in the same journal that makes the best available case for a Tahitian origin; two 2021 papers on a comparable Pacific specimen; a 2025 monograph on one drawer of the same Liverpool collection; National Museums Liverpool's own collection pages, story pages and blitz history; the museum's catalogue record as published through its Google Arts and Culture partnership; the taxonomic databases that carry the species — ITIS, Avibase, the US Fish and Wildlife Service; Historic England's listing for the building; and the published visitor statistics.

This is not an article about a bird. It is about a field on a form, and the discipline of leaving it blank.

Latham's A General Synopsis of Birds gave the bird twelve inches of length, a black bill tipped pale yellow, glossy dark green plumage, neck feathers long and narrow like the hackles of a cock, and every feather of the wings and scapulars tipped with a spot of very pale cinereous white, somewhat triangular, with a point running upwards. It is a careful description. A man who has the bird in his hands has written down what he can see.

Then the provenance note, which van Grouw quotes in full: "In the collection of Major Davies. I likewise met with a specimen in that of Sir Joseph Banks. Native place uncertain."

Latham has told us exactly what he knows and exactly what he does not. He names two cabinets in London. He does not name a country, an ocean, a voyage or a collector abroad, and van Grouw's reading of him is that he never speculated as to their provenance at any point. Gmelin took Latham's description and attached a scientific name to it — Columba maculata — in 1788 by van Grouw's dating and 1789 by the dating carried in ITIS and Avibase. Neither man added a place, because neither man had one.

Where the record should be, and is not

A locality note for an eighteenth-century bird skin should exist in one of five places, and it is worth naming them precisely, because naming them is the only honest alternative to naming an island.

On the specimen itself, as a written label or a tag tied to the leg. The skin carries no such label.
In the private register of the collector who owned it. Major Thomas Davies, an army officer and topographical painter who lived from about 1737 to 1812, kept and mounted the bird — van Grouw judges the taxidermy probably Davies's own work — and had correspondents in New South Wales, among them Governor Phillip, Colonel Nepean and Governor King.
In the catalogue of the sale that dispersed the collection. Davies's collection was auctioned in London on 6 and 8 June 1812. The pigeon appears there as lot "324, Spotted Green Pigeon, Columba maculata", with the country of origin given as "uncertain".
In the purchaser's own annotated copy. Lord Edward Smith Stanley, later the 13th Earl of Derby, bought it and wrote beside the entry "now in mine!" — an exclamation about ownership, not about geography.
In the receiving museum's accession register. Stanley's collection, the Knowsley Museum, came to the city of Liverpool by bequest in 1851, becoming the Derby Museum, then the Liverpool Museum, now the World Museum. The specimen's number in Liverpool is still 324, the number it carried out of the 1812 sale room.

Four of those five documents exist and have been read by a curator. The fifth, the original label, never existed or did not survive. What the four say, consistently, across a hundred and forty years of custody, is nothing. We should be plain that we did not open Stanley's annotated catalogue ourselves; Hein van Grouw did, examining the specimen in November 2012 and publishing what the paperwork holds in 2014. We are relying on a curator who went and looked. That is not the same as looking, and we are not going to pretend otherwise.

What popular coverage gets wrong

The received version is that this was a Tahitian bird — the tītī of Polynesian tradition, one more island endemic killed off in the Pacific. It circulates in extinct-bird compendia, in encyclopaedia entries, in the wildlife pages that recycle them, and, more consequentially, in the structured metadata of institutions that ought to know better.

Three examples, all of them databases rather than blogs. The catalogue record for the specimen published by National Museums Liverpool through its Google Arts and Culture partnership fills the locality field with the single word "Tahiti", and its caption reads: "The history of the specimen is unclear, but the species is now thought to have been found on Tahiti." The Integrated Taxonomic Information System, the United States federal taxonomic reference, gives the species a Geographic Division of "Oceania" on a record flagged "verified — standards met". Avibase states that it "probably was native to an island or island group in the South Pacific".

Set against that, the peer-reviewed source. Heupink, van Grouw and Lambert, publishing in BMC Evolutionary Biology on 16 July 2014, wrote the position out flatly: "No locality data exist for either of the Spotted Green Pigeon specimens" — adding that both collectors focused heavily on Oceania, which is why some authors have concluded the species originated there. On the Tahitian bird specifically, their sentence is eleven words long and contains its own rebuttal: "It has been suggested the pigeon resembles an extinct bird from Tahiti, but this has been disputed."

The museum's own prose is better than the museum's own metadata. Its story page on the specimen, quoting Clem Fisher, then Curator of Vertebrate Zoology, says the bird "would have come from either the Indian subcontinent, southeast Asia or Oceania" — a hedge spanning roughly a third of the planet, and an accurate one. The United States Fish and Wildlife Service species page is more accurate still: it has a Geography heading, and under the heading there is nothing at all. That blank is the most truthful statement about this animal's distribution that any public body has published.

The best case for Tahiti, stated fairly

There is a serious argument for Tahiti and it deserves to be put properly rather than dismissed. Philippe Raust made it in the Bulletin of the British Ornithologists' Club in March 2020. Teuira Henry's Ancient Tahiti, published as Bishop Museum Bulletin 48 in 1928, contains the sentence: "The titi, which cried 'titi', now extinct in Tahiti, was speckled green and white." The objection has always been that tītī is a seabird name across Polynesia. Raust shows the name was used more broadly than that — for a columbid as well as for petrels and for other species whose calls transcribe as ti-ti-ti — and points to the Reverend John Davies's Tahitian dictionary of 1851, which records tītīhope'ore, glossed as a bird's name and parsing as a tītī without a long tail. His conclusion is careful: it is reasonable to speculate that the titi was a dark white-spotted columbid living in high-altitude forest, which corresponds approximately to what little is known of the spotted green pigeon.

Read that sentence for what it is. It is a philological argument from a nineteenth-century dictionary and a twentieth-century ethnography to an eighteenth-century skin. It is not evidence of provenance, and Raust does not claim it is. A name in a dictionary is not a locality note. Between a plausible identification and a recorded one there is a gap, and the gap is the subject of this dossier.

Fossils would settle it, and they have not. The genus has one other member known from Oceania: a fossil species, Caloenas canacorum, named by Balouet and Olson in 1989 from late Quaternary deposits in New Caledonia — some four thousand kilometres west of Tahiti. Steadman and Takano's 2020 review of columbid hindlimb osteology across Oceania places Caloenas among the terrestrial pigeons; the Liverpool bird, with its long toes, large claws and short tarsus, is not terrestrial at all.

In East Polynesia the columbid fossil record that does exist is other genera. Rigal, Kirch and Worthy's 2018 survey of the Gambier Group found Columbidae dominating the land birds at 58.9% of the minimum number of individuals recovered, in a group with no columbids living on it today — but the species were Bountyphaps, a new Ducula, and a Ptilinopus. No Caloenas. The same paper is candid that the geography of Pacific archaeology is uneven and that whole voids remain in the region's avian prehistory. An absence of fossils is not evidence of absence. It is simply one more place we looked and found no address.

A control specimen, and what is left of this one

To see how thin the record is, compare a bird that everyone agrees is Tahitian. The Tahiti sandpiper Prosobonia leucoptera also survives as one mount, at the Naturalis Biodiversity Center in Leiden, registered RMNH.AVES.87556. Jansen, Kamminga and Argeloo reconstructed its history in 2021, using archives, X-rays of the internal armature and comparison of taxidermy technique against specimens of known provenance in Stockholm and Göttingen. Their finding is uncomfortably familiar: the mount carries no original label, first appears in museum records in 1848 with Temminck's collection, is not mentioned by Temminck himself, and was labelled Tahiti afterwards.

What rescues the sandpiper is not the skin. It is the drawings. Their companion paper catalogues four original illustrations made on Cook's second and third voyages, and those images carry places and dates: a Forster drawing from Tahiti in August 1773 or April–May 1774; Ellis and Webber drawings from Moorea in September–October 1777; a fourth from Kiritimati. A Pacific bird properly anchored to the Pacific is anchored by dated field images, not by the specimen. For the spotted green pigeon there is no such image and no such anchor. Avibase records one illustration for the species; it is the description's own plate, made in London, from the skin.

The skin itself is a poor witness and an eloquent one. Van Grouw found the feet attached the wrong way round, left where right should be, though the feet are the bird's own. Red paint survives around the empty sockets, so the taxidermist wanted red eyes. Wing 225 millimetres, and that is an estimate, because in both wings the five outer primaries are missing — not clipped, not broken, no quill remains, pulled out just before or just after death. Tail 126, bill 20, tarsus 33. The plumage is remarkably soft and unpigeon-like, the down heavily pigmented, the gloss weaker than an adult's.

From two of those feathers, Heupink and colleagues recovered three 12S mitochondrial mini-barcodes averaging 64.3 base pairs. On that — roughly two hundred letters of a genome — the bird was shown to be a distinct lineage which, with the Nicobar pigeon, sits basal to the dodo and the Rodrigues solitaire. Shapiro and colleagues had dated the split between that Nicobar line and the dodo to around 42.6 million years ago, with the dodo and solitaire parting about 25.6 million years ago, and had traced the lineage's dispersal out of Southeast Asia. So the pigeon now has a position on the tree of life measured in tens of millions of years, and no position on a map at all.

The drawer, the fire and the ghosts

It is worth knowing what else has happened in that building. On the night of 3 May 1941 some 870 tonnes of high explosive and more than 112,000 incendiaries fell on Liverpool. A bomb struck the Central Library roof; the fire crossed into the museum and burned it from top to bottom. The director's list of losses runs to Pacific ethnography, Liverpool pottery, Anglo-Saxon bronze bowls, Egyptian antiquities and the whole Palaeontology Gallery. Historic England's listing for the building notes, drily, that the interior and the top of the façade were reconstructed after war damage.

Nothing in that account tells us whether the pigeon was in the building. Staff had begun preparing for disaster when war was declared in 1939, dispersing hundreds of objects to country houses and churches across North Wales and Cheshire and to bank vaults in Liverpool. We could find no published list of what went where, so we cannot say whether this skin spent the war in a Welsh rectory or in a basement that burned. It survived; that is the extent of what the record supports.

John-James Wilson's 2025 monograph on a single drawer of that collection — the white-eyes — counts 219 specimens that now exist only as records or illustrations against 31 that survive, across 86 taxa, mostly collected between 1850 and 1900 in 29 modern-day countries. Thirteen confirmed type specimens burned. Those birds were documented and are gone. The pigeon is the exact inverse: it is here, in environmentally-controlled conditions, and its documentation is what is missing. The wider Liverpool bird collection around it holds some 44,000 study skins and over 700 types, the second largest in England, and most of those skins carry a place and a date, because Wallace and Gould and Swinhoe and Tristram's suppliers wrote them down.

Why the Silence Index is 39

Four inputs, weighted 30/30/20/20. Physical remoteness scores 4: the specimen is 300 metres from Liverpool Lime Street, in a city-centre museum on a listed street. Access friction scores 58, which is the only high number and needs explaining — the museum is free to all and open Wednesday to Sunday, but the bird is not on permanent display, a replica stands in its place, and reaching the original means a curatorial appointment with a working zoology department. Visitor volume scores 6: 555,595 people came through the doors in 2024. Unresolved questions score 96, and there is no dishonesty in that figure. The species has been sequenced, placed and declared extinct; the one fact that cannot be recovered is where it lived. That arithmetic gives 39, well below this archive's median of 78, and it should.

We chose unresolved questions rather than night darkness as the fourth input because this dossier reasons about the former and has nothing to say about the latter. It is worth being clear what the 96 does and does not mean. It is not a score for strangeness. The taxonomy is resolved, the phylogeny is resolved, the extinction is not in doubt, and the specimen is catalogued, conserved and photographed. Exactly one question is open, and it is closed in the sense that matters: no new evidence is expected, because the evidence that would have answered it was a sentence on a piece of paper in about 1780. A free museum in a large English city is not a silent place, and we would rather publish a low number honestly than inflate one to make a subject sound remoter than it is. The bird is eleven minutes' walk from an intercity platform. What is silent is one line of one register.

Where we stop

We were commissioned to say where the record ought to be. It ought to be on a paper label in Major Davies's hand, in the 1812 sale catalogue, in Lord Stanley's annotated copy, in the Knowsley register and in the Liverpool accession book. Those documents exist. A curator has read them. They say "uncertain", and they have said it since before the bird was named.

It is worth saying what would change that. Not a genome — the bird already has one, and it placed the species without placing the animal. What would change it is paper: a surviving label in Davies's hand, a letter from one of his New South Wales correspondents itemising what he sent, an annotated copy of the 1812 catalogue in another buyer's library, an unread page in the Knowsley papers. Those are the only kinds of document that can answer this question, and they are all eighteenth- and nineteenth-century manuscripts in private and institutional hands, most of them uncatalogued.

There is a temptation, at the end of a piece like this, to award the bird an island anyway — to say Tahiti with a hedge, or the South Pacific with a shrug, because a species with a place is easier to mourn than a species without one. Van Grouw resisted it and went only as far as the inference the morphology allows: that a provenance never discovered suggests a limited distribution typical of a small and remote oceanic island. That is a statement about the kind of place, not the place. We will not go further than the curator who held the specimen.

So the entry stands as Latham left it. A drawer in Liverpool, at 53.40997°N, 2.98116°W, holds an animal that is certainly a species, certainly extinct, and certainly from somewhere. The somewhere is not in the file. It was probably never written down, and if it was written down, whatever it was written on has not survived Davies, or the sale room, or Knowsley, or 1941. Everything else about this bird has been recovered. Its address has not, and the correct thing to do with an empty field is to leave it empty.

Corner Codex — D-181

Specimen: Spotted green pigeon, Caloenas maculata — one study skin, the only one on earth
Held at: World Museum, National Museums Liverpool, William Brown Street, L3 8EN
Museum coordinates: 53.40997°N, 2.98116°W, derived from Historic England's grid reference
Bird's coordinates: None. No locality has ever been recorded for this species
First described: John Latham, A General Synopsis of Birds, 1783
Latham's locality note: "Native place uncertain"
Specimens known: Two. One in Major Davies's collection, one reported in Banks's. One survives
Provenance chain: Davies → London auction, 6 and 8 June 1812 → Lord Stanley → Liverpool, 1851
Catalogue entry: "324, Spotted Green Pigeon, Columba maculata"; country of origin "uncertain"
Genetics: Three 12S mini-barcodes averaging 64.3 bp, taken from two feathers (2014)
Position on the tree: Unique lineage; with the Nicobar pigeon, basal to the dodo and the solitaire
Status: Extinct. Not on permanent display; a replica stands in for it
Silence Index: 39 / 100

The Traveler's Panel · checked 22 August 2026

Changing information. Prices, permits, seasons and road access change, sometimes at short notice. Everything here is a starting point for your own confirmation — not a quote, and not a guarantee. Verify with the operator and the relevant official body before you book.

What is here	One study skin of an extinct species, the only one in the world
What is not here	Any record of where the bird lived. There never was one
Admission	Free to all. World Museum charges nothing at the door
Opening	Wednesday to Sunday, 10am–5pm; closed Mondays and Tuesdays (Art Fund listing)
On display?	No. The original is off display; a replica is shown in its place
Footfall	555,595 visits in 2024, ranked 70th of 401 UK attractions
To see the original	A curatorial matter — vertebratezoology@liverpoolmuseums.org.uk
The line to remember	Latham, 1783: "Native place uncertain"

Getting there — Liverpool Lime Street → 300 m north-west on foot to William Brown Street

This is the rarest thing in this archive: a subject you can genuinely reach. World Museum stands on William Brown Street in central Liverpool at L3 8EN, about 300 metres from the concourse at Lime Street, which is a direct intercity station from London Euston, Manchester and Birmingham. Walk out of Lime Street, past St George's Hall, and the museum is the colonnaded building on the left of the row.
Admission is free and no ticket is required for the permanent galleries. The Art Fund listing gives opening as Wednesday to Sunday, 10am to 5pm, with Mondays and Tuesdays closed. We could not load National Museums Liverpool's own visitor pages to confirm that directly — they timed out on every attempt — so check the museum's website before travelling rather than trusting this line.
What you cannot do is walk in and see the bird. The specimen is not on permanent display. The museum's current Lead Curator of Zoology confirmed in February 2026 that a replica is shown instead, and the museum's own earlier account explains why: the skin is fragile and light-sensitive and is kept behind the scenes in environmentally-controlled conditions. It has come out before — there was a fortnight's display from 16 to 30 July after the 2014 DNA result — but that was an event, not a rota.
Seeing the original is therefore a research request rather than a visit. The vertebrate zoology department publishes an enquiries address, vertebratezoology@liverpoolmuseums.org.uk, and the collection is registered in the GBIF Registry of Scientific Collections as NML-VZ. Approach it as you would any working collection of 80,000 vertebrate specimens: with a reason, in writing, in advance, and with the understanding that a curator's time is the scarce resource and the answer may reasonably be no.
If the answer is no, the replica is not a consolation prize. It is arguably the more honest object, because it makes no claim to carry information it does not have.

Indicative costs — verify before booking

Entry to World Museum	Free to all, per the Art Fund listing. There is no ticket
Seeing the replica	Nothing. It is in the galleries with everything else
Seeing the actual specimen	Not a price. It is a permission, granted by a curator or not
What we will not quote	Travel and accommodation. This is a city-centre museum in a large English city and pricing it would tell you nothing you do not know
The real cost	Borne already, and not by you. A species, a second specimen, and the one line of paperwork that would have told us where it came from

What to pack

Nothing. This is a free museum with cloakrooms, on a paved street, 300 metres from a mainline station. Any packing list we invented would be an insult to the reader.
If you are coming to see the replica: the 1783 description, so you can compare Latham's cinereous-white triangular spots against what is in front of you.
If you are writing to the curators: a specific, answerable question. 'Can I see the pigeon' is not one. 'I am working on X and need to check Y on the specimen' is.
Low expectations about revelation. The object tells you almost nothing, and that is the point of it.

Where to stay

There is nothing exceptional to say about staying in Liverpool and we are not going to pretend otherwise: this is a large city with a full range of accommodation, and the museum is in the middle of it, between Lime Street and the Walker Art Gallery on a street of listed civic buildings. The more useful advice concerns time rather than lodging. If the point of the trip is the pigeon, the trip does not work — the original is off display and the replica takes ninety seconds to look at. If the point is the collection that contains it, allow properly for it: World Museum holds over a million natural history specimens, including some 44,000 bird study skins and over 700 type specimens, the second largest bird collection in England after the Natural History Museum's. Most of those skins carry a place and a date on a small paper label, written by Wallace or Gould or Swinhoe or one of Tristram's suppliers, and the galleries are one of the few places where you can stand in front of that habit of record-keeping and see what its absence costs.

Safety & responsible travel

Do not repeat 'Tahiti' as the bird's origin, and be especially careful because a museum metadata field says it. The peer-reviewed position, published in 2014, is that no locality data exist for either specimen.
Do not call it a mystery either. Nothing has been concealed and nothing is waiting to be revealed. A piece of information was not written down, or was written down and destroyed, and that is an ordinary and irreversible archival event.
Cite van Grouw and Heupink rather than this dossier if you are writing about the specimen. We have read the papers; we have not read the registers, and neither have most of the sources that assert an island.
Respect the curators' time. World Museum's zoology department looks after 80,000 vertebrate specimens with a small staff, and the pigeon attracts far more attention than its share.
If you find an eighteenth- or nineteenth-century document that records a locality for this species, the correct destination is the museum and the ornithological literature, not social media. It would be the first such document in 243 years.

Nearby, and quieter

Everything relevant is within a few hundred metres, which is unusual for this archive. The Walker Art Gallery is the immediate neighbour on William Brown Street; the Picton Reading Room and Hornby Library are on the other side, and it was through the Central Library roof that the bomb came on the night of 3 May 1941, spreading fire into the museum and burning it from top to bottom — 870 tonnes of high explosive and more than 112,000 incendiaries fell on Liverpool that night, and the entire Palaeontology Gallery was among the losses. St George's Hall closes the view towards Lime Street. Further out, at Knowsley Park about 13 kilometres north-east, the 13th Earl of Derby kept his menagerie in the 1830s and 1840s in an enclosure some 600 metres north of the Hall, and it was from Knowsley that thousands of skins came to the city by bequest in 1851 — the pigeon among them, already carrying the number 324 and already unattributed to any country on earth.

Getting there, in order

1Liverpool Lime Street
↓
2300 m north-west on foot to William Brown Street

Each leg is a separate booking and a separate chance to be weathered out. Build spare days into the chain, not onto the end of it.

Where it is

World Museum, William Brown Street, Liverpool · 53.4100°N 2.9812°W · Open in Google Maps · OpenStreetMap

Key locations

World Museum, Liverpool — the drawer; coordinate converted from Historic England NGR SJ 34876 90799
53.4100°N 2.9812°W
Walker Art Gallery — immediate neighbour on William Brown Street; NGR SJ 34973 90811
53.4101°N 2.9797°W
Picton Reading Room and Hornby Library — the library complex struck on 3 May 1941; NGR SJ 34934 90781
53.4098°N 2.9803°W
St George's Hall — between the station and the museum; Grade I, NGR SJ 34931 90656
53.4087°N 2.9803°W
Liverpool Lime Street station — arrival point, about 300 m south-east of the museum; NGR SJ 35127 90483
53.4072°N 2.9773°W
Knowsley Park — the 13th Earl's menagerie and the source of the 1851 bequest; NGR SJ 45296 94884
53.4479°N 2.8251°W

Coordinates are for orientation and are accurate to roughly the width of the feature named, not to a doorway. Several of these points are inside protected areas or need a permit, a guide or a boat — read the access notes above before you plan a route to any of them.

Sources & further reading — checked 22 August 2026

BMC Evolutionary Biology — Heupink, van Grouw & Lambert, 'The mysterious Spotted Green Pigeon and its relation to the Dodo and its kindred', 14:136 (16 July 2014). The statement 'No locality data exist for either of the Spotted Green Pigeon specimens, both collectors however heavily focussed on the Oceania region'; the Tahitian resemblance 'has been suggested ... but this has been disputed'; two specimens held by Banks and Davies with only the latter surviving at World Museum; DNA from two feathers via three 12S mini-barcodes averaging 64.3 bp; and the result placing the species with the Nicobar pigeon basal to the dodo
Bulletin of the British Ornithologists' Club — van Grouw, H., 'The Spotted green pigeon Caloenas maculata: as dead as a Dodo, but what else do we know about it?', 134(4): 291–301 (2014). Latham's 1783 text quoted in full including 'Native place uncertain'; the Davies collection auctioned in London 6 and 8 June 1812 and bought by Lord Edward Smith Stanley; the catalogue entry '324, Spotted Green Pigeon, Columba maculata' with origin 'uncertain' and Stanley's note 'now in mine!'; the 1851 bequest to Liverpool; the Royal College of Surgeons' 1806 catalogue listing 87 stuffed animals and no Columba maculata; measurements of wing 225 mm (estimated), tail 126, bill 20, tarsus 33; the five outer primaries pulled from each wing; the reversed feet; and the conclusion that a provenance never discovered suggests a small remote oceanic island
Natural History Museum open repository — record for van Grouw (2014), Bull. B.O.C. 134(4): 291–301. The bibliographic record and abstract confirming a single specimen at World Museum Liverpool, first described in 1783, shown by DNA to be a distinct species within the extended dodo clade and possibly of strongly arboreal habits — used here to verify citation details
Bulletin of the British Ornithologists' Club — Raust, P., 'On the possible vernacular name and origin of the extinct Spotted Green Pigeon Caloenas maculata', 140(1): 3– (19 March 2020). The fullest published case for Tahiti: Teuira Henry's 1928 line 'The titi, which cried titi, now extinct in Tahiti, was speckled green and white'; evidence that tītī was applied to a columbid as well as to procellariids; the Rev. John Davies's 1851 Tahitian dictionary entry tītīhope'ore; and Raust's own framing of his conclusion as reasonable speculation
British Ornithologists' Club — Bulletin 140 contents index. Confirms Raust's paper as the first article of Bulletin 140(1), published 19 March 2020, pages 1–102 — used to verify the citation and the correct issue PDF
Bulletin of the British Ornithologists' Club — Jansen, Kamminga & Argeloo, 'The history of the sole surviving mount of Tahiti Sandpiper Prosobonia leucoptera' and 'Taxonomic implications of the original illustrations of Prosobonia', 141(2): 127 and 133 (15 June 2021). The comparator case: the Tahiti sandpiper mount at Naturalis, RMNH.AVES.87556, carries no original label, first appears in 1848 with Temminck's collection and was labelled Tahiti afterwards; and the four Cook-voyage drawings that do carry dated localities — Forster at Tahiti August 1773 or April–May 1774, Ellis and Webber at Moorea September–October 1777, and a fourth from Kiritimati
British Ornithologists' Club — Bulletin 141 contents index. Confirms both Prosobonia papers at pages 127 and 133 of Bulletin 141(2), 15 June 2021, and supplies the direct issue PDF used above
National Museums Liverpool — 'World Museum's Liverpool Pigeon related to the Dodo'. The museum's own prose account, quoting Clem Fisher, then Curator of Vertebrate Zoology, that the bird 'would have come from either the Indian subcontinent, southeast Asia or Oceania'; that it is usually kept behind the scenes in environmentally-controlled conditions because of its fragility and sensitivity to light; and the limited display window of Wednesday 16 July to Wednesday 30 July
Google Arts & Culture / National Museums Liverpool — catalogue record, 'Spotted Green Pigeon'. The museum's structured metadata record giving Locality as 'Tahiti' and medium as study skin, with provenance 'Bequethed to the people of Liverpool by the 13th Earl of Derby in 1851' and a caption stating 'The history of the specimen is unclear, but the species is now thought to have been found on Tahiti' — the clearest instance of the attribution entering an institutional field
Integrated Taxonomic Information System — TSN 1125232, Caloenas maculata. The US federal taxonomic record: Caloenas maculata (J. F. Gmelin, 1789), taxonomic status valid, credibility rating 'verified – standards met', and a Geographic Division of 'Oceania' recorded for a species with no locality data
US Fish & Wildlife Service — species profile, Spotted Green Pigeon (Caloenas maculata). A federal species page carrying ITIS number 1125232 and a Geography section that is present and entirely empty — cited here as the most accurate public statement of the bird's range
Avibase — Caloenas maculata (Spotted Green Pigeon). Authority given as (Gmelin, JF 1789) with protonym Columba maculata; IUCN status Extinct; the range note 'known only from two specimens (one of which now is lost) and one illustration; probably was native to an island or island group in the South Pacific'; and recognition of the species across IOC, Clements, eBird, HBW and BirdLife checklists
Science — Shapiro, Sibthorpe, Rambaut, Austin, Wragg, Bininda-Emonds, Lee & Cooper, 'Flight of the Dodo', 295 (1 March 2002). 37 pigeon and dove species sequenced across 1.4 kb of mitochondrial DNA; the dodo and Rodrigues solitaire nested within Columbidae with the Nicobar pigeon as closest living relative; the dodo–Caloenas split dated to about 42.6 Ma (31.9–56.1) and the dodo–solitaire split to about 25.6 Ma (17.6–35.9); and dispersal from Southeast Asia to the Mascarenes
Natural History Collections and Museomics — Wilson, J-J., 'Ghosts and entanglements in one drawer of a natural history collection: The White-eyes (Aves, Passeriformes, Zosteropidae) of World Museum, Liverpool', 2: 1–52 (2025). 219 'ghost' specimens surviving only as records or illustrations against 31 extant, across 86 taxa; one drawer destroyed when the Liverpool building was bombed and burned out in 1941; specimens mostly collected 1850–1900 across 29 modern-day countries; the Derby and Tristram source collections and their web of colonial suppliers; and 13 confirmed types destroyed
Palaeontologia Electronica — Rigal, Kirch & Worthy, 'New prehistoric avifaunas from the Gambier Group, French Polynesia', 21.3.43A: 1–35 (2018). Columbidae dominating the land birds at 58.9% of minimum number of individuals in an archipelago with no columbids left alive; the species recovered being Bountyphaps cf. obsoleta, Ducula tihonireasini n.sp. and Ptilinopus sp. indet., with no Caloenas; and explicit acknowledgement of voids and uneven coverage in East Polynesian avian prehistory
Zootaxa — Steadman & Takano, 'A new genus and species of pigeon (Aves, Columbidae) from the Kingdom of Tonga, with an evaluation of hindlimb osteology of columbids from Oceania', 4810(3): 401–420 (2020). The description of Tongoenas burleyi and Ducula shutleri, and the classification of Oceanian columbids into arboreal, intermediate and terrestrial groups on tibiotarsus and tarsometatarsus proportions, with Caloenas placed among the terrestrial pigeons
Smithsonian Research Online — Balouet & Olson, 'Fossil birds from late Quaternary deposits in New Caledonia', Smithsonian Contributions to Zoology 469 (1989). The repository record confirming the publication in which the only other Oceanian Caloenas, the fossil C. canacorum, was named — from New Caledonia, roughly 4,000 km west of Tahiti. We read the catalogue record, not the paper itself
GBIF — Caloenas canacorum Balouet & Olson, 1989. Confirms the name, authority and date of the fossil congener and that no occurrence records with images are held — used to verify the authorship of the only other Oceanian Caloenas
National Museums Liverpool — Bird collection. About 44,000 study skins, 4,000 mounted birds and around 16,700 egg clutches; over 700 type specimens; the second largest bird collection in England after the Natural History Museum; the Derby founding collection enhanced by the purchase of Tristram's collection in 1896; and named suppliers including Wallace, Gould, Swinhoe, Jerdon, Layard, MacGillivray and Cuming
National Museums Liverpool — Vertebrate Zoology collection. 80,000 specimens of birds, mammals, reptiles, amphibians and fish, many over 150 years old; the collection registered in the GBIF Registry of Scientific Collections as NML-VZ; and the enquiries address vertebratezoology@liverpoolmuseums.org.uk, the route by which access to the specimen would have to be requested
National Museums Liverpool — Natural History collections. Over a million specimens at World Museum, including 400,000 plants and fungi, 67,000 rocks, minerals and fossils, and 80,000 vertebrates — the scale against which one undocumented skin sits
National Museums Liverpool — 'Bombed out! World Museum and the Blitz'. The night of 3 May 1941, with 870 tonnes of high explosive and more than 112,000 incendiaries falling on Liverpool; a bomb through the Central Library roof spreading fire into the museum; and Director Douglas Allen's list of losses including Pacific ethnography, Egyptian antiquities and the entire Palaeontology Gallery
National Museums Liverpool — Blitz casualties. The account of fire reaching the basement where objects had been moved for safety, burning roof timbers falling into air vents, and the destruction of the Upper Horseshoe gallery which had housed the natural history displays
National Museums Liverpool — Museum evacuees. Preparations from the declaration of war in 1939, with hundreds of objects dispersed to country houses and churches across North Wales and Cheshire and to bank vaults in Liverpool — without a published list of which collections went where
National Museums Liverpool — 'Getting to know Edward Lear… on his own terms'. The 13th Earl of Derby's patronage of Lear, who painted the live and dead specimens at Knowsley Hall intermittently between 1831 and 1837; and the 1851 donation of thousands of animal skins from Knowsley to the city, forming the founding collection of what is now World Museum
NatSCA — Wilson, Piesse & Grossman, 'Liverpool, Natural History and Extinction: The Case of a Real Liver Bird' (5 February 2026). Written by World Museum's current Lead Curator of Zoology with two university colleagues: the specimen is not on permanent display and a replica is shown in its place; the 1851 Derby bequest; the 2014 DNA confirmation; and, notably, a date of 1793 for Latham's description where the peer-reviewed literature gives 1783
Historic England — National Heritage List entry 1063781, William Brown Library and Museum. Grade II*, first listed 28 June 1952, National Grid Reference SJ 34876 90799 — the source of this dossier's coordinate for the building; built 1857–60 by Thomas Allom with modifications by John Weightman; interior and top of façade reconstructed after war damage by R. Bradbury
Historic England — National Heritage List entry 1293335, Lime Street Station, Liverpool. Grade II, first listed 14 March 1975, National Grid Reference SJ 35127 90483, begun 1867 by Francis Stevenson and William Baker — the arrival point 300 m from the museum door
Historic England — National Heritage List entry 1359620, Hornby Library and Picton Reading Room. Grade II*, listed 28 June 1952, National Grid Reference SJ 34934 90781 — the library complex whose roof was struck in May 1941, from which fire crossed into the museum next door
Historic England — National Heritage List entry 1063782, Walker Art Gallery. Grade II*, listed 28 June 1952, National Grid Reference SJ 34973 90811, built 1874–77 by H. H. Vale — the immediate neighbour on William Brown Street
Historic England — National Heritage List entry 1361677, St George's Hall, Liverpool. Grade I, listed 28 June 1952, National Grid Reference SJ 34931 90656 — used here as a verified waypoint between Lime Street and the museum
Historic England — National Heritage List entry 1000997, Knowsley Park. Grade II registered park, listed 1 February 1986, National Grid Reference SJ 45296 94884; the Stanley seat since 1385; and the 13th Earl's collection of exotic animals and birds kept in the 1830s and 1840s in an area about 600 m north of the Hall
Association of Leading Visitor Attractions — 2024 visitor figures. World Museum Liverpool at 555,595 visits in 2024, ranked 70th of 401 listed attractions and down 20% year on year; alongside Museum of Liverpool at 829,692 and the Walker Art Gallery at 175,476 — the footfall figure used in this dossier's Silence Index
Art Fund — World Museum, Liverpool. Address William Brown Street, Liverpool, Merseyside, L3 8EN; telephone 0151 448 4393; open Wednesday to Sunday 10am–5pm and closed Mondays and Tuesdays; admission free to all
GOV.UK — DCMS-sponsored museums and galleries annual performance indicators 2024/25, headline release. 42.0 million visits to DCMS-sponsored museums and galleries between April 2024 and March 2025, 41.8 million on a like-for-like basis — the national context for a free national museum, with site-level tables published separately
National Museums Liverpool — 'Liverpool takes top spot for visitor attractions'. Nearly 2.5 million visits across National Museums Liverpool venues in 2022, with World Museum named the North West's most visited attraction in ALVA's research and visitor numbers more than doubling on the previous year while remaining below pre-pandemic levels
Australian Museum — The Sarah Stone Collection. The Leverian Museum's dispersal: an auction by James Parkinson running 60 days in 1806 in which more than 26,000 objects went to museums large and small and to individuals including Donovan, von Fichtel and Bullock; and Sarah Stone's 132 watercolours as the last visual record of the collection
Wellcome Collection — catalogue record, Fisher, C. (ed.), 'A passion for natural history: the life and legacy of the 13th Earl of Derby' (2002). The standard published account of the Derby collection: National Museums and Galleries on Merseyside, 2002, 239 pages, ISBN 1902700147, issued with the exhibition marking 150 years since the Liverpool Museum's establishment. We located the record; we did not obtain the book
Internet Archive — catalogue record, Latham, J., 'A general synopsis of birds', v.2:pt.2 (1783). Confirms the existence, volume, part and 1783 date of the volume carrying the original description, published by Leigh & Sotheby, 534 pages with hand-coloured plates — the catalogue record only; the scanned text itself was not readable from this session
Bishop Museum — Bulletins online index. Confirms Bernice P. Bishop Museum Bulletin 48 as Teuira Henry's 'Ancient Tahiti' (1928, 651 pages) and that no PDF is offered for it — establishing the citation for the tītī passage while showing why we rely on Raust's quotation of it

Official and scientific bodies are the authority for safety, regulatory and scientific claims. Commercial operators are used only for practical detail such as tour length, meeting points and indicative pricing — never for a safety or scientific statement.

How this was made

Desk research. Compiled from official bodies, scientific and conservation sources, established journalism and licensed operators. Not based on a personal visit.

Editor’s method note — what we checked, corrected and could not verify

Desk research only. Nobody from this publication has visited World Museum for this dossier, opened the drawer, or examined the specimen. Every physical observation of the skin in this piece is Hein van Grouw's, published in 2014 after an examination in November 2012.
Every URL cited was opened and read before citation. Sources that could not be opened are listed near the end of this note and are cited nowhere in the piece.
We do not nominate a place of origin. That is the whole method. Where a source gives one, we attribute it to that source by name rather than adopting it: Tahiti to National Museums Liverpool's Google Arts and Culture record and to Raust's 2020 argument, Oceania to ITIS, the South Pacific to Avibase, and 'the Indian subcontinent, southeast Asia or Oceania' to the museum's own story page.
The commissioning brief for this dossier assumed an acquisition chain running Leverian Museum → 13th Earl of Derby → Liverpool, and flagged the risk that a locality note might sit in the 1806 Leverian sale catalogue. Van Grouw's provenance research does not support that chain. The documented route is Major Thomas Davies's own collection, auctioned in London on 6 and 8 June 1812, purchased there by Lord Stanley. We could not open the 1806 Leverian catalogue and do not cite it; on the published evidence it is not the relevant document.
We did not read the 1812 sale catalogue, Stanley's annotated copy, the Knowsley register or the Liverpool accession book. We are reporting what a curator who read them published about them. That distinction is stated in the body and we will not blur it.
Two dates for the scientific name are in circulation and we print both without choosing: van Grouw gives Gmelin 1788; ITIS and Avibase give Gmelin 1789. Similarly, the peer-reviewed literature dates Latham's description to 1783 while World Museum's own current curator, writing for NatSCA in February 2026, gives 1793. We report the discrepancy rather than silently correcting it.
Coordinates for every panel point are converted by us from Historic England's published National Grid References using the standard Ordnance Survey OSGB36 projection formulae and the Helmert transformation to WGS84. They are accurate to within a few metres of the listed building's grid reference, which is itself a building-scale rather than door-scale figure. No coordinate in this dossier is attached to the bird, because none exists.
The Silence Index arithmetic is shown in the body: remoteness 4, access friction 58, visitor volume 6, unresolved questions 96, weighted 30/30/20/20 to give 39. The footfall input is the ALVA figure of 555,595 for 2024. We publish the score low deliberately; a free city-centre museum is not a remote place, and only the record is silent.
Sources we could not read, and therefore did not cite anywhere: the BioOne full text of Raust (2020), blocked by an Incapsula challenge, which is why the Bulletin's own issue PDF is cited instead; the PubMed Central copy of Heupink et al., behind a reCAPTCHA; the PubMed record for the same paper, which returned no content; the Biodiversity Heritage Library item pages for Latham's General Synopsis and for the 1806 Leverian sale catalogue, all 403; the Internet Archive full-text streams for both of those works, robots-disallowed; the National Library of Australia's copy of the Leverian catalogue, blocked; the Pensoft PDF of Wilson (2025), which returned 'File not exists', so only the article landing page and its abstract are cited; the BirdLife DataZone factsheets for both Caloenas maculata and Caloenas nicobarica, which render their data fields only in JavaScript and returned nothing but 'Loading…'; the IUCN Red List species page, for which we could not find a working URL at all; the Wiley and ScienceDirect papers by Steadman on Society Islands and East Polynesian extinctions, 403 and robots-blocked; Fisher's 1990 Archives of Natural History paper on the Knowsley menagerie at Edinburgh University Press, 403; GBIF's Registry of Scientific Collections record for NML-VZ, robots-disallowed; and National Museums Liverpool's own visitor-information pages for World Museum, which timed out repeatedly, which is why the address and opening hours are cited to Art Fund and the building coordinate to Historic England.
Things we could not verify: where the spotted green pigeon lived, by any route; whether Sir Joseph Banks ever actually held a second specimen, Latham's sentence being the only evidence and the Royal College of Surgeons' 1806 catalogue not listing one; when, where or by whom either bird was collected; whether the surviving skin ever carried a written label; whether the specimen has a public accession record beyond the number 324 inherited from the 1812 sale, no collections-database entry for it being findable online; whether the original is currently accessible to researchers and on what terms, the vertebrate zoology enquiries address being the only published route; whether Teuira Henry's tītī and this bird are the same animal, which Raust himself frames as speculation; why the five outer primaries were pulled from each wing before or shortly after death; and whether any eighteenth- or nineteenth-century document recording a locality for this species survives unread in a collection somewhere, which we cannot rule out and have not been able to rule in.

AI is used to draft this text, and a human checks it. Every figure, date and quotation above was verified by Tony Hall against the source cited for it in the reference list; where sources disagree, the disagreement is shown rather than resolved, and where a claim could not be confirmed it is either marked unverified or left out. The illustrations are AI-created and labelled as such — no photograph on this site is presented as a record of a real place. Full disclosure · Editorial policy.

Access details change — recheck before you travel. Found an error? Tell us — corrections are dated and shown in place.

Native Place Uncertain: The Liverpool Pigeon and the Line Nobody Wrote