For many years (perhaps influenced by the fact that they weren’t actually in the bird books), I thought that Feral Pigeons (usually just referred to as pigeons) were rather stupid, annoying birds — ‘flying rats’, I believe the nickname was. Privately, I applauded the decision to get rid of the seed-sellers on Trafalgar Square. I changed my mind on this several years ago after reading Stephen Moss’s This Birding Year, his highly engaging compendium of bird-related newspaper columns. Here’s what he wrote about pigeons:
“In fact Feral Pigeons are amazing birds, with an extraordinary history, having mutated from the wild Rock Dove to the ultimate city slicker we know today. The Feral Pigeon has been scandalously ignored both by professional ornithologists and amateur birders, with the notable exception of Eric Simms, whose book The Public Life of the Street Pigeon taught us most of what we know about them.”
(Eric Simms was before my time, but Moss is not the only current birding writer to give him a shout-out (David Lindo has done so as well). Years ago, probably because those two had both referred to him, I added his Birds of Town and Suburb to my birding library, and although I have yet to get around to actually reading it, it has survived various book-purges that have to be carried out on a periodic basis in my house!)
What Moss said got me thinking, and led to a change in how I regard these birds. When you think about it, they are indeed rather amazing. They, more than any other bird, have managed to adapt incredibly well to man-made environments so well that they are to all intents and purposes urban birds (although you can, of course, also see them in rural areas!). Originally, they were domesticated as a source of food as well as for carrying messages (their powers of navigation are remarkable), and over time many of them escaped and bred in the wild; they are known to have been breeding in London since the fourteenth century at least. Rock Doves nest (as their name implies) in holes on cliff faces, and cavities in buildings and on ledges are an entirely acceptable urban alternative. Their feral cousins have thrived, they come in all sorts of colour variations and can now be found in cities throughout the world, where we humans provide plenty of food for them even without recourse to having to buy seeds from a street-hawker specifically for that purpose.
These days, they are of course listed in the bird books!
And they are very much evident in East Finchley, to the point where I have heard the raised flower-bed at the corner of East End Road and the High Road described as ‘Pigeon Corner’ (although the sign saying not to feed them has, last time I looked, gone).
Such is their success that the original, ‘pure’ Rock Doves (indistinguishable from some Feral Pigeons; specifically those with the pale grey backs, dark wing bars and that green-and-purple sheen on the sides of their necks) are confined to remote areas, and even there they will probably be joined by (and therefore interbreed with) Feral Pigeons eventually; the two are the same species (although some ornithologists make a distinction by adding the word domestica to the above Latin name when referring to Feral Pigeons), a situation summed up best in that weighty and invaluable tome, Birds Britannica (of which I was delighted to find a second-hand copy of in the second-hand bookshop that adjoins the souvenir shop at Kenwood House):
“The species’ image involves a reverse pattern to the one evident in carrion and hooded crows… Instead of being two birds with a single cultural profile, it is one species with a split personality.”
Which if anything makes them all the more fascinating! These days, when I see one I simply jot down the initials ‘FP’ in my notebook. This happens a lot! I sometimes wonder if the days when I didn’t write ‘FP’ are days when I saw one and just didn’t give it a thought, so ubiquitous are they.
