Opinions on Pigeons

Until recently I never had much time for woodpigeons. They
always seemed quite puddingy, birds that galumphed and little else. Once, in
the garden, I watched one perch on the water butt. I glanced away for half a
second and it had fallen in. I picked the daft thingout and sighed as it
pottered to and fro on the grass drying off. My abiding memory is of looking down
at it as it drifted, blue-grey and white, on the dark water, with one white-ringed
uncomprehending eye gazing at me as I lifted its feather weight.

I could make a case for woodpigeon as glutton. When I put
the bird food out, a robin lands almost immediately. Then the magpies come, confident,
intelligent, but one or two hours later I look out of the window and there are
woodpigeons stamping up and down, great shoeboxes of birds, picking up every
last grain.

Woodpigeon as prey: the neighbouring cats have had a few,
and a sparrowhawk once smashed one in the act of taking off. Once or twice the
“chack-chack” alarm call of a blackbird has launched a pigeon into the glass of
our back door. It’s a gruesome sight when a bird with a broken neck, its head
drooped by its flank, is shuddering through its final breaths.

And yet - “Coo, coo, I love you…”

My daughter gave this summary of the pairing of pigeons in
our garden. Just outside our back door is a panel fence that only looks
pleasant in summer, when the raspberries are ripening. Pairs of woodpigeons use
this fence as their love arena, where the male, puffed up and startlingly iridescent
green around the neck trots sideways to and fro from the female, dipping and
ducking as he does so. When the female accepts him they beak-wrestle, heads
pushed close together and seeming about to wind neck about neck. It’s an
engaging sight, as is the display flight, like an up-and-down stroke in
Japanese calligraphy, the descent marked by spread wings and tail as if the
brush tip were being pressed a little harder to the page.