Pigeons and Doves: Background information when reading Pigeons

Pigeons and Doves

This article relates to Pigeons

• Pigeons and doves are one and the same thing, "pigeon" is simply a French translation of the English word "dove".
• Pigeons have been domesticated for at least 5,000 years, probably closer to 10,000.
• It is said that a pigeon delivered the results of the first Olympics in 776 BC.
• Pigeons are credited with saving thousands of soldiers' lives during the 20th century.&
• At least 20,000 died in combat during the 20th century.  In World War II the US army had 54,000 birds in its pigeon corps, trained and cared for by about 3,000 soldiers known as "pigeoneers".
• Homing pigeons, weighing around 1 lb, routinely fly over 500 miles a day at speeds exceeding 60 mph, and have been clocked flying as fast as 110 mph for several hours.  Compare that to a racehorse, weighing in at over 1,000+ lbs, that does a couple of circuits of a track at about 35 miles an hour before being wheeled back to its comfortable stable!
• During World War II, pigeons were dropped into occupied France on their ownlittle parachutes, so they could carry French Resistance reports back out.
• Pigeons mate for live.
• Unlike other birds that collect water in their beaks and tip their heads back to drink, pigeons suck their water like a horse at a trough.
• Pablo Picasso often paintedpigeons and named his daughter Paloma - Spanish for "pigeon".
• Left to their own devices, the pigeon population in an urban area will maintain itself at manageable levels, but when humans intervene by feeding the birds, they chronically overbreed.  Worse still, when pigeons are fed leftover bread made from processed flour they tend to "poo rock-hard droppings that can be so difficult to remove they practically require sandblasting", thus worsening their already poor reputation.
• The now extinctPassenger Pigeon was a distant cousin of the rock dove.  The birds were named for their giant, en masse migrations (passages in French).  Birds would fly in one mile wide formations up to three hundred miles long.  John Muir described their all-day passage like a "mighty river in the sky, widening, contracting and descending like falls".  A single breeding ground could cover up to 750 square miles. At the time Europeans arrived in North America, conservative estimates put the population of passenger pigeons at about 5 billion birds (40% of the total bird population), and while very good for eating, could be ruinous to crops.
• Although Passenger Pigeons were hunted widely, they were not in serious danger until the second half of the nineteenth century when they met their match in commercial scale hunting, made possible by the introduction of both the telegraph service and trains - the former alerted the hunters to the birds' flight path, the latter enabled them to get to the spot in time to start shooting.  The final death knell was the ongoing mass deforestation of their natural breeding grounds.   The Passenger Pigeon became extinct on September 1st, 1914, when Martha, the last of her kind, died in Cincinnati Zoo.

Filed under Nature and the Environment

This "beyond the book article" relates to Pigeons. It originally ran in December 2006 and has been updated for the October 2007 paperback edition. Go to magazine.

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