In Genesis’s Noah’s Ark story, Noah sent out a dove after the raven to test the waters.
Genesis 8 records a sequence of bird releases. Noah first sent a raven, then sent a dove to see whether the waters had receded from the surface of the ground. The dove initially found nowhere to rest and returned to the Ark, after which Noah waited and sent it out again.
The dove’s later return with an olive leaf is the best-known part of the episode, but the first release is also significant because it begins the repeated test for habitable land. “Pigeon” can seem plausible in ordinary language because pigeons and doves belong to the same bird family, yet Genesis’s conventional translation says “dove.” The answer is the bird named in the narrative, not a general category of waterfowl.