I can understand how for some animals having patterns giving the false impression of a giant set of eyes can be of benefit. For example, an Angelfish with a set of eye-spots on it’s butt might leave a run-in with an Moray eel with a nick in it’s tail fin instead of ending up as lunch, or an Orb Weaver spider who’s spooky yellow eye-spots confuse a hungry bird just long enough to make a get away.
And then there are Prairie Doves…
For those unfamiliar, Prairie Doves have two eye spots on their wings that combines with a stripe in the base of their pinfeathers when the birds nestle up to form the image of an adorable little happy face. The only way to describe it would be “hey! I’m harmless!! Go ahead and eat me!!”.
And that’s exactly what they do. Every spring coyotes, cats, hawks, rattlesnakes, foxes – any carnivore you can mention - gobble the stupid little things up left and right (and they really are stupid. I once had one in my backyard doing a courtship display for a rolled-up pair of tube socks).
My point is: What the hell is the use of having a face pattern if it’s not intimidating and it fools nobody?
My only conclusion is that it could have been a successful adaptation at one time and thus was passed on to successive generations, but predators evolved around it faster.
-or-
The face is just a complete coincidence. And it just passed from generation to generation because it was the sign of a healthy Prairie Dove.
I’m a lifelong birdwatcher, and I’ve never heard of a “prairie dove.” So I did a search and the only reference I can find is to the Franklin’s gull (Larus pipixcan), which is sometimes known as a prairie dove (and which, as you see if you’ll check the link, doesn’t appear to have any eyespots).
Can you find an alternate name, or a Latin name for the bird you’re referring to? Or a link with a picture?
I know exactly what you mean, but unfortunately I can’t find a picture of it that shows the “smilie face”. It’s properly (and more generally) referred to as a “mourning dove”, zenaidura macroura, and yeah, when it’s sitting, and you’re looking at it straight sideways, there are two black dots and a black wingbar that looks just like a slightly crooked smilie face.
Neither of these pix does it justice, but it’s the best I can do at the moment. My copy of the Robbins Bruun Zim Singer Birds of North America field guide shows it perfectly, on page 155.
My WAG as to the purpose of this would be that it’s not a “don’t mess with me” warning, but rather a camouflage device, to break up the silhouette of a bird sitting on a nest.
And I don’t notice that mourning doves are an endangered species, so evidently it’s not a failed “don’t mess with me” evolutionary device.
Well, if it is, in fact, the “Mourning Dove” you’re talking about, then I think seeing those spots as a smilie face is a bit of a stretch, and I feel completely confident in stating as fact that no other animal, predatory or otherwise, would see it as such.
The mourning dove nests on the ground, IIRC, and the black spots on the dun background probably serve to help camouflage the bird against, say, a field of pebbles (or what have you) by–see DDG’s post above–breaking up the outline: drawing the eye away from the edge of the silhouette and making it slightly more difficult for an animal to discern the dove’s shape against the ground.