Pigeon Patrol

Wartime hero pigeon Paddy honoured with fly-past

by Pigeon Patrol | Nov 23, 2021 | Columbidae, Doves, history of pigeons, MBCA, pet bird

One of Northern Ireland’s smallest World War II heroes has been honoured.

Paddy, a messenger pigeon who served with the RAF during the Normandy operations in June 1944, was remembered in his home town of Larne on Friday.

PDSA, Britain’s biggest veterinary charity, awarded Paddy the Dickin Medal, dubbed the animals’ “Victoria Cross”, 65 years ago this month.

He received it for being the fastest pigeon to reach England with a coded message from the battle-front beaches of Normandy.

The brave bird brought back vital information about the Allies’ progress, flying 230 miles in four hours 50 minutes – the fastest time of any of the messenger pigeons involved in the mission with an average speed of 56mph.

PDSA spokesman James Puxty said: “Paddy’s contribution to the D-Day operations was a credit to the thousands of messenger pigeons donated by the racing pigeon fraternity for service during World War II.

“He was one of 32 brave, feathered heroes that received the PDSA Dickin Medal for their life-saving flights during the war, and the only recipient from Northern Ireland.”

Local hero

Paddy was born and raised in Carnlough and joined thousands of other racing birds who were trained and drafted to RAF Hurn in Hampshire for military service.

Impressing military brass with his flying in the Air-Sea rescue units he was seconded to the United States First Army for undercover missions during the Normandy Landings.

In the face of poor weather conditions and the threat of German falcons, deployed to intercept Paddy and his comrades, he delivered his message to his home loft at RAF Hurn.

After the war Paddy returned to Carnlough and lived out his days with his owner Captain Andrew Hughes, until his death in 1954.

A memorial to the winged hero was erected in Carnlough harbour.

A feathered fly-past of pigeons formed part of the Paddy Memorial Day event held at Larne Museum and Arts Centre.

Larne Borough Council and the town’s historical society were joined by guests from PDSA and the owner of Paddy’s PDSA Dickin Medal, former Irish Army officer Kevin Spring.

Younger guests were entertained by Gail Seekamp, the children’s author, who read from her book “Paddy the Pigeon”.

The Dickin Medal was introduced in 1943 by Maria Dickin, PDSA’s founder. She wanted to recognise the gallantry and devotion to duty of animals serving with the Armed Forces and Civil Defence units during WWII.

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Airborne pigeons obey the pecking order

by Pigeon Patrol | Nov 16, 2021 | Bird Netting, Bird Spikes, Columbidae, Doves, history of pigeons, MBCA

During flight, pigeons in a flock follow the leader.

Pigeons wearing miniature backpacks containing tracking devices have revealed that the birds rapidly shift direction during flight in response to cues from the leading members of their group.

“It is the first study demonstrating hierarchical decision-making in a group of free-flying birds,” says Tamás Vicsek, a biophysicist at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest who led the study, which is published today in Nature¹.

The discovery became possible only recently with the introduction of Global Positioning System (GPS) devices that can collect data at a high rate: five times per second. Vicsek’s team strapped lightweight GPS devices to individual pigeons and tracked flocks of up to 10 birds during free flights lasting around 12 minutes and 15-kilometre homing flights. In total, the GPS logged 32 hours of data and captured 15 group flights. The researchers couldn’t pinpoint individuals’ exact positions within a flock, but were able to accurately compare birds’ directions of motion.

Within flocks, the authors looked first at the behaviour of pairs of birds. For each possible pairing, the team identified a leader — the bird that changed direction first — and a follower, which copied the leader’s motion. Followers reacted very quickly, within a fraction of a second.

Next, the scientists constructed a network of relationships among birds in the group during each flight. They uncovered a robust pecking order: birds higher up the ranks had more influence over the group’s movements, and each individual’s level of influence was consistent across specific free and homing flights.

However, this influence was not always consistent between flights, with some rearrangement occurring among birds at the head of the flock. Vicsek speculates that this may have occurred because an original leader had tired. Co-author Dora Biro, an animal behaviour expert at the University of Oxford, UK, says, “This kind of group decision-making is more complicated than previous models suggested.”

Follow the leader

Although pigeons have an almost 340º field of view, the researchers found that the birds at the front of a flock tended to make the navigational decisions. Moreover, birds responded more readily to a leader’s movements if the leader was on their left side. These findings concur with previous work that indicated that social cues entering a bird’s left eye receive preferential processing in the brain².

“No other study has contributed more to our understanding of collective decision-making in actively homing animals, not by a long shot,” says Todd Dennis, an expert in pigeon navigation at the University of Auckland in New Zealand. He likens the birds’ group behaviour to that of a cabaret dance troupe, in which less-experienced dancers towards the rear correct themselves by watching experts at the front. “The study provides a very important model for how collective behaviour and leadership can be assessed in a range of animal groups,” he says.

The authors say that a hierarchical arrangement may foster more flexible and efficient decision-making compared with that of singly led or egalitarian groups. In future studies, the scientists plan to investigate whether leaders are better navigators, and whether hierarchies persist in larger groups and in other types of social animal. “If it’s true that there’s an evolutionary advantage to making decisions in this way, then there’s absolutely a reason to assume that it could have evolved in other species too,” Biro says.

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The effect of habitat and number of inhabitants on the population sizes of feral pigeons around towns in northern Poland

by Pigeon Patrol | Nov 16, 2021 | Bird Spike, Pigeon Spikes, Pigeons, Pigeons in the News, Raccoons, Sparrows, UltraSonic Bird Control

Most studies on factors influencing density of the feral pigeons Columba livia var. domestica were carried out in large cities and agglomerations. However, also in small towns, pigeons are important epidemiological and sanitary problem. In our studies, feral pigeons were censused in 33 towns located in the Pomeranian Province (northern Poland) during 2006–2008. These birds occurred in 19 (57.6%) towns. The number of pigeons was positively correlated with the area of the town, and it was significantly higher in towns localized in agricultural landscape than in towns surrounded by forests. We also found a significant effect of interactions between type of a landscape surrounding a town and residual number of inhabitants on the abundance of pigeons. In the largest towns of the Pomeranian Province, feral pigeons were concentrated mainly in central quarters. In smaller towns, they were noted in central parts or in areas with blocks of flats and even the suburbs. The obtained results suggest that food conditions in small and middle towns may be not sufficient for colonization by pigeons.

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What Makes the Passenger Pigeon Different From All Other Pigeons

by Pigeon Patrol | Nov 16, 2021 | Bird Netting, Bird Spikes, Columbidae, Doves, history of pigeons

Not a Carrier Pigeon, Not a Messenger Pigeon, Not a Rock Pigeon
The passenger pigeon and the rock dove (Columba livia, aka rock pigeon, carrier pigeon, etc) are often confused in the public’s mind but they are not closely related. The dock dove is a Eurasian species that has been semi-domesticated for centuries and has been introduced into North America. They like to nest on ledges, which is one reason they have proliferated in cities around the world in a feral state.

Passenger Pigeons Were Unlike Any Other Bird in the World
in at Least Three Important Ways
The Passenger Pigeon was a bird solely of North America, with the vast majority inhabiting a region from the Gulf States to Hudson’s Bay, and from the Atlantic Ocean to the upper Missouri River. Three things made them unique in all the world:
1) they were the most abundant bird of the continent, if not the world: no one knows for sure how many there were but the most careful figure offered ranges from a low of three billion to a high of five billion individuals;
2) they aggregated in numbers that darkened the sky for as much as three days: individual flights might have exceeded two billion birds; and
3) in literally decades, human actions reduced this incredible bounty to zero, when on September 1, 1914, the last of the species died. Given that it is extinct, very little was known about its relationships to other birds until recently.

Where Passenger Pigeons Belong in the Tree of Life
Scientists divide the vast array of life forms into categories based on the similarities and relationships between organisms. From broadest to narrowest, these categories are Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, species. All the birds of the world are in the Phylum Chordata, Kindom Animalia, Class Aves and then are divided into 26 orders. (based on the taxonomy of James Clements). These orders include the Falconiformes (hawks), Anseriformes (ducks and geese mostly), Strigiformes (owls), and Passeriformes (the largest order of all which includes the perching birds like warblers, swallows, flycatchers, finches, thrushes, and sparrows).

All pigeons are members of the order Columbiformes which have a number of characteristics that together set them apart from other birds. These include a bilobed crop that produces a sort of “milk” that is fed to the chicks (“crop” is a pocket like space near the throat); monogamous mating behavior; the ability to drink by sucking or pumping; and thick feathers set close to the skin. On a general level, pigeons possess stocky bodies with small heads, bills, and feet. (Passenger pigeons were among the sleekest of pigeons). There are 42 genera and 308 recognized species of Columbiformes.

Pigeons of the World: From 8 Pounds to 22 Grams
There is no difference between pigeons and doves: the terms are interchangeable. Pigeons are found throughout the world. Some pigeon species eat mostly fruit, whereas others forage on seeds. The fruit-eating Columbiformes tend to be much more vividly colored than the seed eating ones. The largest species is the Victoria crowned pigeon (Goura victoria) of New Guinea which approaches the size of a turkey and can weigh in excess of 8 pounds. The smallest species are members of the ground dove genus (Columbina): they can be as small as house sparrows and weigh not more than 22 grams.

Until recently, the relationship of Passenger Pigeon with respect to other pigeon species has been simply speculation based on gross plumage characteristics. However, recent genetic data published in 2010 by Johnson and colleagues (Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution 57:455) show that, despite the gross similarity in appearance to mourning doves and its relatives (the genus Zenaida), the Passenger Pigeon is not closely related to this group of pigeons at all. In fact, its closest relatives are a group of large-bodied pigeons from the New World in the genus Patagioenas, which includes the western Band-tailed Pigeon among others. Even so, scientists believe that Passenger Pigeon is still different enough from other extant pigeons to remain in its unique genus, Ectopistes. Based on an analysis of the evolutionary tree constructed from genetic data, Johnson and colleagues (2010) hypothesized that eons ago an Asian cuckoo dove crossed into North America and provided the ancestor to both Ectopistes and Patagioenas.

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Loved or loathed, feral pigeons as subjects in ecological and social research

by Pigeon Patrol | Nov 16, 2021 | Pigeon Droppings, Pigeon Patrol's Services, Pigeon Predators, Pigeon Spikes, Pigeons, Pigeons in the News

The feral pigeon (Columba livia) carries with it a reputation that runs counter to conservation: it is feral, exotic and invasive and even considered down right filthy. But upon closer inspection, the pigeon could be a subject worthy of study for both ecological and social science purposes and highlight the importance of urban species in ecology. This insight on pigeons occurred during an urban ecology study that focused on habitat and population dynamics of the birds and is also supported through an extensive literature review. As a nearly ubiquitous species, we discuss how important pigeons are as a prey-base for numerous raptors and underscore our position by highlighting several studies on the biological uptake of environmental contaminants that may have benefited from including the pigeon as part of the research. We further our stance on the importance of pigeons in urban ecology by highlighting additional concerns such as zoonotic disease and climate change. We expand our case by turning to the social construction of nature, the importance of public participation in conservation. Once again, the ubiquitous presence of pigeons lends itself well to citizen science in ecology and conservation, especially to show trends across a range of geographic locations. In short, this commentary strives to reconceptualize the feral pigeon, promoting the bird as a valuable asset to ecological and social research in ways that raise awareness for conservation concerns and advance our scientific thinking.

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Wartime hero pigeon Paddy honoured with fly-past

Local hero

Airborne pigeons obey the pecking order

The effect of habitat and number of inhabitants on the population sizes of feral pigeons around towns in northern Poland

What Makes the Passenger Pigeon Different From All Other Pigeons

Loved or loathed, feral pigeons as subjects in ecological and social research

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