September 2012

August to September is a time when days are getting shorter, but some of them can still be quite hot.  Fruit and seeds are ripening, and most birds are in moult.  Insects abound everywhere, and spiders begin to proliferate.  Swallows and house martins are still pumping out babies, but the swifts have gone back to Africa.  It is the height of the pigeon breeding season.  Let’s dwell on these maligned birds for a while.

There are five species of pigeons in Britain, these are, from large to small: wood pigeon, stock dove, rock dove, collared dove and turtle dove.  It is worth taking a moment to understand these enigmatic birds.  All five can produce milk!  This is crop milk that they feed to their young beak to beak, and is secreted through the walls of the bird’s crop.  All five produce just two white eggs at each nesting attempt, as would have the dodo which was a flightless pigeon that lived on Mauritius.  All five can drink by inserting their beak in water and sucking.  All other birds have to scoop water and lift their head to let it run down their throat by force of gravity.

These five pigeons do have many differences as well; wood pigeons have a complex courtship that involves a dance and lots of cooing.  They will nest in a flimsy platform of twigs that sometimes you can see the eggs through from underneath.  Many woodpigeons are winter visitors from the continent.  Stock doves are a bit like wood pigeons but are rarer, resident and have no white on them, and they nest in holes in trees, or sometimes in barns.  Rock doves live on wild cliffs, usually on the coast, and make their nests in cavities in the cliffs.  Rock doves are the ancestors of all the domestic pigeons including fan-tails and racing pigeons.  Feral pigeons are simply domestic pigeons/ rock doves that have decided to look after themselves in towns.  Collared doves are a new colonist in Britain, arriving in the second half of the last century.  Also known as Turkish doves, they were domesticated by the Turks, but went feral and spread across Europe, They are always associated with human communities.  Finally turtle doves are our only summer migrant pigeon.  Sadly declining in Britain, this beautiful bird likes to breed in early successional woodland such as we find on Ashdown Forest.  Many get shot as they fly from Africa to Britain, but there may be other reasons why they are declining that we do not understand yet.