Loathe them or hate them, pigeons are incredibly successful, aren’t they? The city variety, which hobble and wheeze their toeless way through London’s streets, are the descendent of rock doves, dainty birds of pale slate grey and purple-green iridescent plumes that inhabit wild cliff faces around the Mediterranean.
But since their domestication, humans have taken them wherever they went, and as we built castles, cathedrals, towerblocks, and skyscrapers, escaped birds have made these artificial cliffs their homes.
Across generations, pigeon fanciers developed various breeds, from the homing and racing pigeons to specialised strains for eating. And then there are the fancy ones: a range of breeds in many colours, some with outlandish pom-pom crests, some with curly feathers, and even a group known as tumblers that roll over backward during flight. The feral birds that populate our cities, however, are of wild rock-dove type in most respects, if not always colour.
So while pigeons thrive in cities, they are also bloody marvellous at dying: squashed by cars in explosions of blood and feathers, or trapped in nets put up to prevent them nesting under bridges, their putrefying bodies dripping onto passers-by (which I presume why being shat upon by a pigeon is good luck, because at least it’s not dead bird juice).
Some pigeons die in less visibly repulsive ways – swallowed whole by pelicans in St James’ park for example. And the success of pigeons must in part be helping the colonisation of cities by peregrine falcons, the natural nemesis of the wild rock dove.
Inspired by a school in Primrose Hill, which has a falcon-shaped kite flying above their grounds to frighten off pigeons, I stuck a cut-out falcon on my window to deter a persistent pair from their daily efforts to nest in my cut-and-come-again salad windowbox.
It worked for a while, but now they just perch on the balcony, undeterred, shitting on my rocket.
Pigeon pickings
1. Pigeons were probably the first birds to be domesticated, perhaps as many as 10,000 years ago in Mesopotamia. Chicks (also known as squabs) and eggs were collected from artificial roosts for food and their droppings could have been used as fertiliser by early farmers.
3. Charles Darwin took great interest in the diversity of fancy pigeons, and his observations of them provided evidence for his theory of evolution.
4. The pigeon family is one of the most widely spread groups of birds, with species having become established on even the remotest islands. Indeed, the poster-bird of extinction, the dodo, was a large flightless pigeon.
5. In the UK, feral pigeons are actually outnumbered by their larger, fatter, and somewhat more attractive cousins the woodpigeons, but high numbers in city centres mean that many urban dwellers are more familiar with the feral birds, which are rarely seen in the countryside.
Dartmouth Park-based writer Peter Hayward trained in zoology and evolutionary biology before becoming editor of a medical journal, starting his Animal Of The Week blog back in 2004 @animaloftheweek
