Lifebird #30 - Pigeon Fancying
Once I started checking off birds in our copy of Birds of Minnesota and Wisconsin, I had to count my first pigeon sometime and somewhere. So one fine April morning on my drive to work at Hamline University, I glanced at one of the billboards that line Snelling Avenue just north of campus, and there as always stood a line of feral, invasive, and “watcha-gon’-do-aboud-it?” Rock Pigeons. Bobbing their heads, preening their feathers, and occasionally diving off of their perches to swoop over the railroad tracks and busy city street: day-after-day these pigeons blissfully ignore the worthless fake plastic owl hammered in place at the top of one of the billboards in a failed attempt to scare them away.
Update (August 2020): Though we regularly see pigeons less than a half-mile from our Shoreview home, we have yet to see one in or from our yard. We haven’t seen a House Sparrow here either. We have 103 species on our yard list, but neither of these two “pests” that are ubiquitous and unwelcome visitors to the feeders of so many. At this point it is starting to get weird.
In 2009 I read Andrew D Blechman’s interesting book Pigeons. I recommend it.
Species | Rock Pigeon / Columba livia |
Where | Hamline/Midway area, St Paul, MN |
When | Apr 2004 |
With | Joann |
Number | 30 |
See lifebird index.