Pigeon Patrol

Birmingham pigeon fanciers inspire play

by Pigeon Patrol | Jul 27, 2021 | pet bird, Pigeon Control, Pigeon Droppings, Pigeon Patrol's Services, Pigeon Predators

Pigeon fanciers in Birmingham have provided the inspiration for a new play, which the team behind it plan to stage at a city pigeon loft.

The play is written by Mandy Ross and based on an idea by Alex Lockett.

Artist and curator Alex Lockett said the play has developed from a project to chronicle the lives and stories behind a hidden passion in the city.

She said she had become “hooked” herself a little more than four years ago.

“Project Pigeon started as an arts event. I went along to a pigeon club and all these guys were telling me some amazing stories,” she said.

“I went from knowing nothing to keeping about 50 or 60 birds in a loft in Digbeth.”

Pigeons on trains

In January of this year Project Pigeon was awarded a £43,000 grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund to compile an archive of pigeon fancying in the city.

More than 30 audio interviews and a dozen videos later the archive is almost complete.

It is due to be handed over to Birmingham Library next year, with some of the stories also going to Bletchley Park’s Animals at War exhibition.

Ms Lockett said pigeon fancying had become more popular in the West Midlands than any other region in the country, with its popularity in Birmingham driven by industrialisation and the development of the railways.

“People would take their pigeons down to New Street Station or Snow Hill and let them travel north or south.

“The railway stationmaster would later release them and the baskets would be sent back with the time of release attached to them. That happened right up until the 1960s.”

Today some of the best racing birds can be worth thousands of pounds.

Birmingham Roller

Ms Lockett said people were still passionate about the sport in the city but she had feared some of its social history might be lost.

“One guy had tables of every club race result from the last 30 years. You could see sons following fathers and the same names appearing at the bottom of the results.”

The city has even given its name to a breed of pigeon, known as the Birmingham Roller, bred not for speed but for its ability to perform somersaults in the air.

Fans of the bird include ex heavyweight boxer Mike Tyson, who has in the past bought birds from Birmingham and Wolverhampton breeders, in a bid to find a genuine Roller, Ms Lockett said.

Stories unearthed by Project Pigeon include that of Betty and Bernard Hemming who met and later married after Bernard struck up a friendship with her brother, a fellow pigeon fancier.

A murkier world was also revealed when one contributor revealed he had stolen a bird from a neighbour as a child and dyed it purple to prevent it being recognised.

The play, performed by Rogue Play Theatre, is due to be staged at Project Pigeon’s loft in Digbeth in April. A book is also being written and a series of radio plays, based on the interviews, are expected to be broadcast in February.

Source

Pigeon Patrol Products & Services is the leading manufacturer and distributor of bird deterrent (control) products in Canada. Pigeon Patrol products have solved pest bird problems in industrial, commercial, and residential settings since 2000, by using safe and humane bird deterrents with only bird and animal friendly solutions. At Pigeon Patrol, we manufacture and offer a variety of bird deterrents, ranging from Ultra-flex Bird Spikes with UV protection, Bird Netting, 4-S Bird Gel and the best Ultrasonic and audible sound devices on the market today.

Voted Best Canadian wholesaler for Bird Deterrent products ten years in a row.

Pigeon/Pigeon Patrol / Pigeons Roosting / Vancouver Pigeon Control /Bird Spikes / Bird Control / Bird Deterrent / Pigeon Deterrent? Surrey Pigeon Control / Pest /Seagull deterrent / Vancouver Pigeon Blog / Birds Inside Home / Pigeons in the cities / Ice Pigeons/ What to do about pigeons/ sparrows , Damage by Sparrows, How To Keep Raccoons Away, Why Are Raccoons Considered Pests/ De-fence / Pigeon Nesting/ Bird Droppings / Pigeon Dropping/ woodpecker control/ Professional Bird Control Company/ Keep The Birds Away/ Birds/rats/ seagull/pigeon/woodpecker/ dove/sparrow/pidgeon control/pidgeon problem/ pidgeon control/flying rats/ pigeon Problems/ bird netting/bird gel/bird spray/bird nails/ bird guard

Messenger / Homing Pigeons & Their Applications

by Pigeon Patrol | Jul 19, 2021 | Bird Netting, Bird Spikes, Columbidae, Doves, pet bird, Pigeon Control

Homing pigeons are called messenger pigeons when they are used to carry messages. Messages have to be written on light, thin paper (such as cigarette paper) and rolled into a small tube that is attached to the bird’s leg. This is called “pigeon post.”

They have also been used to carry small light-weight packages, in including smuggling drugs into prisons.

RACING

In recent history, they are mainly used for the sport of pigeon racing. They have been bred for racing and can reach speeds between 60 – 80 miles per hour. They can fly up to 80 to 600 miles in one single day.

In 2010, Jose Ledesma’s pigeons finish a personal racing season in Canary Islands with amazing resultss. Two young birds raced 3 times each from African coast in Morocco. Long Distance Races + 1st Regional Price against 1312 pigeons (National race equivalent in Belgium). Jose made an amazing movie of these pigeons flying over mountains, seas and deserts: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IAGKflxwxwI … Further information can be found on his website: http://www.joseledesma.com/ – J. Ledesma, Tenerife – Canary Islands

THE CARRIER OF MESSAGES

During the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1871, the Prussians had surrounded the city of Paris preventing mail from entering or leaving the city. During the course of the siege, pigeons and mail were regularly taken out of Paris by hot-air balloons. The letters that were sent to Paris were first reduced in size by photography, so that 30,000 letters could be carried on film placed inside a canister. These canisters were attached to pigeons and these birds then flew into Paris. Thirty-five birds carried the same letters, so that if any were shot down, at least one would reach Paris. In Paris, the film was projected on a screen, and the letters were copied by hand and delivered to homes in the city.

These birds have been used to transport short messages across long distances. In fact, historically well-known leaders, such as Julius Caesar and Genghis Khan, have used them to carry important messages across long distances.

One of the world’s best known news agencies, Reuters, started its European business by using 45 trained birds to carry financial news on the continent in 1850. They carried the latest news and stock prices from Aachen in Germany to Brussels in Belgium, travelling the 76 miles in a record-breaking two hours – beating the railway by four hours.

The Chinese used them to deliver mail as long ago as 1000 B.C.

Source

Voted Best Canadian wholesaler for Bird Deterrent products ten years in a row.

Scientists give extinct passenger pigeon a place on the family tree

by Pigeon Patrol | Jul 19, 2021 | Pigeon Predators, Pigeon Spikes, Pigeons, Pigeons in the News, Raccoons, Sparrows, UltraSonic Bird Control

With bits of DNA extracted from century-old museum specimens, researchers have found a place for the extinct Passenger Pigeon (Ectopistes migratorius) in the family tree of pigeons and doves, identifying this unique bird’s closest living avian relatives for the first time. The new analysis, which appears this month in Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution, reveals that the Passenger Pigeon was most closely related to other North and South American pigeons, and not to the Mourning Dove, as was previously suspected.

“This research demonstrates the remarkable potential of DNA to answer questions about species that no longer populate our planet,” says Dr. Jack Dumbacher, Curator of Ornithology at the California Academy of Sciences. “The Passenger Pigeon has been extinct for almost 100 years, but with the help of museum specimens and DNA analysis, we’re still learning new information about the bird’s evolutionary history and its place on the tree of life.”

Naturalists have long lamented that one of North America’s most spectacular birds was also one of the first to be driven to extinction by humans. In the early 1800s, the Passenger Pigeon was the most abundant bird species on the planet, even though its range was limited to the eastern and central forests of the United States and parts of eastern Canada. Flocks of Passenger Pigeons included millions of birds–they were so vast that they darkened swaths of the sky up to a mile wide.

Passenger Pigeons followed their food, settling down in forests that periodically produced a superabundance of acorns and chestnuts. The pigeons nested in dense colonies covering hundreds of acres. This made them easy targets for human predators. Intensive pigeon hunting in the mid-to-late 19th century disrupted the birds’ ability to breed. These hunting sprees, coupled with habitat destruction, rapidly drove the Passenger Pigeon to extinction. (The last of her kind, a Passenger Pigeon named Martha, died in the Cincinnati Zoo in 1914.)

To find the Passenger Pigeon’s place in the evolutionary history of pigeons and doves, Dumbacher and his colleagues compared sequences from two of its mitochondrial genes with those of 78 species of pigeons and doves from around the world. Their analysis revealed a surprising result. Most scientists had assumed that the Passenger Pigeon’s closest relative was the Mourning Dove, a smaller species that shared the Passenger Pigeon’s relatively long tail. However, the DNA comparison showed that the extinct bird’s closest living relative is the Band-Tailed Pigeon (Patagioenas fasciata), a bird that is commonly found in California.

North America’s largest pigeon, the Band-Tailed Pigeon is distinguished not only by its large size but by its distinctive coloring, with yellow legs, a patch of iridescent greenish-bronze feathers on its neck, and a yellow bill with a black tip. Despite its large size, the bird is surprisingly adept at feeding on berries and seeds in the tops of trees. In northern California, it is found in mixed evergreen forests and redwood forests.

The research team was lead by Kevin Johnson, an ornithologist with the Illinois Natural History Survey at the University of Illinois. Additional team members included Jack Dumbacher from the California Academy of Sciences, Dale Clayton from the University of Utah, and Robert Fleischer from the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute. The research was funded by the National Science Foundation.

Source

Voted Best Canadian wholesaler for Bird Deterrent products ten years in a row.

The pigeon has landed

by Pigeon Patrol | Jul 19, 2021 | Bird Deterrent Products, Doves, history of pigeons, MBCA, pet bird, Pigeon Control

I have written before about the widespread fear of German paratroops in Britain in May and June 1940. Here’s a sterling example from somewhere in London, as described in the Ministry of Information’s Home Intelligence report for 7 June 1940:

A false alarm on a housing estate of parachutists occasioned by a flock of pigeons resulted in about half the tenants rushing to the roof and the rest rushing to the shelters in the basement. In the melee several women fainted. These people are normally calm and collected. They seem to need more advice as to what to do and how to do it on such occasions. ¹

It’s hard to imagine how an ordinary flock of pigeons could be mistaken for descending parachutists. But if there’s one thing I’ve been hammering over and over on this blog, it’s this: fear can make people see danger in the innocuous, whether it’s footpaths, meteors, motor cars, Venus, Venus, weather balloons, or even nothing at all. Having said that, there’s less evidence of widespread misperception of this sort (as opposed to rumours, of which there are many, though with frustratingly few details) in the MOI reports than I might have expected.

Source

Voted Best Canadian wholesaler for Bird Deterrent products ten years in a row.

Testing pigeon memory in a change detection task

by Pigeon Patrol | Jul 19, 2021 | Pigeon Predators, Pigeon Spikes, Pigeons, Pigeons in the News, Raccoons

Six pigeons were trained in a change detection task with four colors. They were shown two colored circles on a sample array, followed by a test array with the color of one circle changed. The pigeons learned to choose the changed color and transferred their performance to four unfamiliar colors, suggesting that they had learned a generalized concept of color change. They also transferred performance to test delays several times their 50-msec training delay without prior delay training. The accurate delay performance of several seconds suggests that their change detection was memory based, as opposed to a perceptual attentional capture process. These experiments are the first to show that an animal species (pigeons, in this case) can learn a change detection task identical to ones used to test human memory, thereby providing the possibility of directly comparing short-term memory processing across species.