Pigeons courting (photo by Aomorikuma via Wikimedia Commons)
In the spring a fuller crimson comes upon the robin’s breast
In the spring the wanton lapwing gets himself another crest
In the spring a livelier iris changes on the burnished dove
In the spring a young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love.
A lot of us love birds but we see them from afar. Those who live with them have a special relationship that goes much deeper.
Pigeon fanciers breed and race pigeons but it’s a relationship that goes both ways. The birds benefit from those who care for them and the people are made happy by being with their birds. This video about three New York pigeon fanciers is a window on their world.
As Vincent Outerbridge says, “This is the life. I wouldn’t trade it for nothin’.”
p.s. Pigeons were easy to domesticate because they are docile in the hand. As you can see in the film, they’re so docile that they can be held upside down and passed from hand to hand.
A study of rock pigeon (Columba livia) brain power indicates they can read four-letter words (*).
Researchers at the University of Otago in New Zealand and Ruhr University in Germany quizzed four pigeons on their orthographic abilities.
According to Science Daily, “In the experiment, pigeons were trained to peck four-letter English words as they came up on a screen, or to instead peck a symbol when a four-letter non-word, such as ‘URSP’ was displayed. … The pigeons correctly identified the new words as words at a rate significantly above chance.”
Eventually the four birds in the experiment recognized 26 to 58 real words and correctly labelled over 8,000 as non-words. They’re the first non-primate species found to have this ability.
So yes, pigeons know when they’re looking at a real 4-letter word but like naïve children they don’t know what it means.
The spruce grouse (Falcipennis canadensis) is a resident of the northern forest in Canada, Maine, Minnesota and the northern Rockies. Though he resembles our state bird, the ruffed grouse, his diet keeps him north of us.
In winter our ruffed grouse (Bonasa umbellus) eats buds, twigs, catkins, ferns and fruit — easy food to find in Pennsylvania.
Not so the spruce grouse. His winter diet is conifer needles. They’re so hard to digest and he has to eat so many of them to stay alive that his digestive system changes in the fall. According to Cornell’s All About Birds, his “gizzard grows by about 75 percent, and other sections of the digestive tract increase in length by about 40 percent.” Before the snow falls he stocks up on grit so his gizzard can grind up the needles.
In September 2012 Sparky Stensaas found this spruce grouse swallowing road grit and feasting on a tamarack in northern Minnesota. Tamaracks loose their needles in October so the grouse had to eat them right away.
This bird eats spruce needles, too. That’s why he’s a spruce grouse.
Click here to see the video full screen and read Sparky’s description of what this grouse was up to.
Screenshot from Pigeon Air Patrol website: pigeonairpatrol.com
The air’s going to be bad in Pittsburgh today — Unhealthy for Sensitive Groups — so don’t take baby out for a stroll this afternoon. How can we know exactly where it’s safe to breathe? Birds and bicycles test the air.
Birds: London, England, March 2016:
Pigeons have been used for breeding, racing and message-carrying. This spring in London the Pigeon Air Patrol tested the air — quite literally.
This is of interest in London because they have a history of bad air with darkness at noon and killer smog (1952). But the air’s OK now, right? Well, that’s not what the pigeons found.
Typical air monitors sample fixed locations but the pigeons flew through hotspots of bad air. Who knew that a particular street corner was a bad place to breathe? The pigeons did.
Rock pigeon hopping down a step (photo by Pimthida via Flickr, Creative Commons license)
12 April 2016
Most of us have a dominant hand that’s our favorite choice for everything that requires skill. About 90% of us use our right hand with only 10% using the left hand or having no preference at all.
Did you know that pigeons (Columba livia) have a favorite foot, but it’s not overwhelmingly the right one?
Pigeon “footedness” was discovered by Harvey I. Fisher at Southern Illinois University in the mid 1950’s while he was looking for something else. In 1954-1955 he was studying the landing force that pigeons exert on a perch, so he recorded the actions of 11 pigeons landing a total of 4,000 times.
That’s when he noticed that most of them extended one foot and landed on it first, and that they had a favorite foot for doing this. He ran more experiments, tallying 7,259 landings.
Seven of the 11 pigeons were right-footed, three were left-footed and one didn’t have a favorite. That’s about 63% right footedness. Read more here in his 1957 article: Footedness in Domestic Pigeons.
Have you heard it? It’s the sound of pigeon applause.
The wings of rock pigeons (Columba livia) often make whistling sounds when they fly, but during the breeding season the males’ wings make a clapping sound, too.
Like many birds, pigeons have courtship rituals before and after mating. Here’s a summary of what they do from Cornell’s Birds of North America:
Before they mate:
The male struts around the female: standing tall, inflating his neck, cooing, bowing and fanning his tail.
They preen each other on the head and neck.
The female asks the male to feed her, like a nestling, by regurgitation. This may be called “billing”
They mate: The female crouches. The male mounts her and balances with open wings.
Afterward the male may do a post-copulatory flight display:
He takes off loudly clapping his wings on the upstroke (behind him) for 3-5 wingbeats.
And then he glides with his wings up in a “V”
Play the audio clip below to hear that distinctive clap.
Listen for it this spring.
(photo from Shutterstock. Click on the image to see the original)
It can happen at any time of year but more often in the warmer months. People suddenly get fed up with the number of pigeons in their area and they want them gone … NOW!
Ideas for instant pigeon removal are usually bad and can be really bad for peregrine falcons who hang out near the pigeons. Last week I got an email from Patricia M. who needed good ideas for pigeon removal because someone in her town wanted to shoot them.
It really is possible to reduce the pigeon population at a specific location. I’ve seen it happen at the Cathedral of Learning in 2007 and at Pittsburgh’s Mellon Square in 2014. The hardest part of pigeon control is changing human — not pigeon — behavior.
— so don’t take baby out for a stroll this afternoon. How can we know exactly where it’s safe to breathe? Birds and bicycles test the air.
