Mystery Bird: Passenger Pigeon, Ectopistes migratorius

I'm going to guess that that's actually a passenger pigeon. I was thinking just the other day, while touring the bird collection at the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History, that a stuffed bird can almost never offer a convincing version of a real, live bird, because the stuffed bird isn't obsessively maintaining its plumage the way a live bird would. Anyway, I thought of that when I saw this image. There's also something about this bird's eye that seems a little dull and lifeless. That led me to check some images of passenger pigeons, and this bird seems like a pretty close match to those.

I would think mourning dove otherwise, due to the general proportions and the length of the tail, but this bird doesn't look quite right for mourning dove, especially in the eye, and the location of the dark flecks on the wings.

Oh, so it's not a Norwegian Blue, then?

I also think it is a (juvenile) passenger pigeon, given the scarlet eye, the small black crescent on the shoulder, and the mussy plumage. The eye seems to be sticking out too far to be real.

looks like a plain ol mourning dove to me....

I have to agree with Passenger Pigeon. The lack of blue on the eye ring and the dark iris should rule out Mourning Dove. Having said that, there are a couple of cautions. Using iris color on a specimen is not a good idea -- the iris is glass or plastic added during the mounting process, and can be wrong. (Which would be a problem if this were actually a specimen of a Mourning Dove.) On the other hand, the lack of a black spot below the auriculars and the width of the primaries both strongly argue against a Mourning Dove as well (as does the lack of geographic information?)