The Feral Pigeon (birds of East Finchley, part 6)

A very regular sight, this one — and not just in East Finchley! Seriously, the Feral Pigeon (Columba livia) is quite literally everywhere. Look out of the window, see a bird, chances are it’s one of these. Odd, then, that when I was a kid I could never find it in my bird book; the closest species was the Rock Dove — of which Feral Pigeons are domesticated descendants — which looked the same but couldn’t have been what I was seeing, because the bird book said that they could only be found on remote Scottish coasts and islands. Not suburban London. 

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.

Ten Birds that Changed the World

Stephen Moss is one of my favourite birding writers, and his latest doesn’t disappoint. 

Published in 2023, Ten Birds That Changed the World is an ornithological take on that sub-genre of non-fiction that looks to explore history through certain items or events; other examples of this sort of book that I have enjoyed include The Anatomy of England (a history of the England football team, told through the prism of ten matches), A History of the World in 6 Glasses (or, six drinks that changed the world) and A History of the World in 100 Objects (a collaboration between the British Museum and Radio Four). Since I clearly like this sort of book, one about birds was always going to be right up my alley.

Stephen Moss is a favourite nature writer of mine; I’ve enjoyed books of his like This Birding Life and The Accidental Countryside — and the fact that he has a column in The Guardian is probably the only reason why that newspaper’s website appears on my browser history. 

Moss’s choice of birds was done in order for each choice to relate to a fundamental aspect of humanity (and how we humans have interacted with birds) — mythology (the Raven), communication (the Feral Pigeon), food and family (the Wild Turkey), extinction (the Dodo), evolution (Darwin’s finches — between fourteen and eighteen species, depending on how you count them), agriculture (the Guanay Cormorant), conservation (the Snowy Egret), politics (the Bald Eagle), hubris (the Tree Sparrow) and the climate emergency (the Emperor Penguin). 

He begins strongly with his chapter on Ravens, looking at their central role in mythology across their range (most of the Northern Hemisphere). Various cultures are explored, which allows Moss to show that he’s done his homework here. This is a well-researched and well-written book. Moss writes well on subjects like extinction and conservation (the story of the Snowy Egret, one of many species of bird killed for its feathers in the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, is also the story of how conservation charities like the RSPB came to be founded), and I think even the most experienced of birders will learn something from this book. 

I learned a few new things. I, like the average reader, had thought that the various species of finch on the Galápagos Islands played a key role in the development of Darwin’s theory of evolution — but on reading this, I was disabused of this notion (although he noticed the finches when he went to the Galapagos, he never mentioned them in On the Origin of Species, and the ‘origin myth’ that the finches provided him with a ‘eureka moment’ with regards to evolution only came about after his death, although that hasn’t stopped natural historians up to and including the legendary David Attenborough from repeating the legend as fact). 

Although I was aware that the excrement of some birds was once a valuable fertiliser known as guano (thanks largely to this being touched on and referred to as such in Dr. No — the novel, not the film — which Moss mentions in passing), I had no idea that a Victorian businessman called William Gibbs (who made his dibs by selling the turds of foreign birds) became the richest commoner in England by importing vast quantities of the shit of the Guanay Cormorant (one of a very small handful of birds named after something it produces), which revolutionised agricultural practices. 

I also had no idea that Mao Tse-Tung (Zedong?) not only tried to eradicate Tree Sparrows in China in the late 1950s but actually managed to whip up enough fervour to get the people to do just that, bringing the bird to near-extinction in the People’s Republic — only to see that action lead directly to a major famine in which millions of people died, as he had not realised that they preyed on insects which, if left unchecked, would decimate the rice crop. The lesson here, other than the fact that Mao was a dangerous nutjob who didn’t think things through but was nevertheless able to maintain an iron grip on the mostly illiterate country he ruled, is that you mess with nature at your peril, which leads onto the final chapter, a hard-hitting polemic about the climate emergency (as he explains, Moss opts not to call it ‘climate change’ as it’s more serious than that). 

By using the Emperor Penguin as his subject in the last chapter, Moss is able to show how climate change is affecting the world by focussing on the polar extremes. It so happens that the Emperor Penguin is one of my favourite birds (not that I’ve ever seen one; zoos aside, the only penguins I have ever laid eyes on were the African Penguins at Simonstown Beach, near Cape Town), quite possibly because when I was a child I loved Penguin’s Progress by Jill Tomlinson but also because they breed during the Antarctic winter, which is amazing. Sadly, their prospects are grim thanks to climate change (not just loss of sea ice but also a decline in krill, their main food), with some scientists forecasting that the species could be close to extinction by the end of this century. 

A somber note on which to end, but what a fascinating book. Definitely worth reading.