Bird Netting Archives

Tastes Like Chicken

by Pigeon Patrol | Nov 30, 2021 | 4-S Gel Bird repellent, Animal Deterrent Products, Bird Deterrent Products, Bird Law, Bird Netting, Bird Spikes

When it comes to pigeon and squab, it’s all relative.

The bird was still steaming as I cut into its succulent red breast. It had spent the day marinating in honey, thyme and vinegar, and now came the roasty aroma and the moment I’d been waiting for: the first moist, silky bite. Surprisingly gamey, the flavor reminded me more of an elk steak than any poultry I’d ever eaten. So this is what pigeon tastes like!

Yes, I served pigeon for dinner, though eaters call it by another name—squab. Long before they were regarded as an urban plague, the hearty little birds served as a staple food and even delectable delicacy, from ancient Egypt to medieval Europe and into modern North America. Only in the past century or so have the birds fallen from culinary grace.

Today, pigeons have found themselves, well, pigeonholed into two groups: the ubiquitous and reviled rat with wings, and a succulent entrée on haute menus. While no New York eater would dream of cooking up the feral fowl, the domestic variety’s pedigree justifies indulging in Thomas Farm’s squab with foie gras–madeira emulsion on Per Se’s $295 winter tasting menu before catching the latest opera. But while they may not flock together, these are indeed birds of a feather.

As lamb is to mutton, veal is to beef, and Cornish hen is to chicken, squab is just another name for a young pigeon, harvested when it is plump enough to satiate an empty stomach but tender enough to please the palate. So how did this divide come about? Is there any difference between the sidewalk scourge and their country cousins cooing on upscale organic farms? Does that which we call a squab by any other name still taste as sweet?

Ancient Egyptians kept domesticated pigeons, which doubled as messengers and main courses. Pigeons carrying postal messages regularly announced arriving visitors, according to records from 2900 BCE, and ancient art depicts Queen Nefertiti handing a pigeon to her young daughter while servants roast the birds.

Starting in the Middle Ages, French lords and ladies considered pigeons a delicacy. The bird’s dung made excellent fertilizer, and its rich red breast earned it the nickname “the bird of royalty.” For several centuries, nobles built elaborate dovecotes to attract feral pigeons (doves are the romantic members of the family Columbidae, which they share with pigeons), though their serfs hated them. The lowly peasants had to feed the voracious birds from their own grain yields and clean up their abundant dung. When the Revolution struck in the 1789, many of the dovecotes—which had become a symbol of aristocracy—were destroyed.

Rock pigeons—the species with whom New Yorkers share our streets—made their landing in the United States precisely because of their tastiness. French settlers introduced the birds in the 1600s, helping to expand their natural range of Europe, North Africa and South Asia into the New World. Early Americans also feasted on the local varieties, like the passenger pigeon, which they quickly began munching into extinction. Though numbering in the billions when Europeans first arrived, passenger pigeons were exploited as cheap food in the 19th century; Martha, the world’s last passenger pigeon, died in 1914 at the Cincinnati Zoo.

While Americans had long caught wild squab or tended small farms flocks, the first U.S. commercial breeding facility for squab popped up in 1874, with production ramping up in the years following. By 1907, hundreds of breeding facilities dotted the country, primarily to sell to restaurants. Some chicken farms were even converted to squab operations, while facilities in Bridgeton, New Jersey, alone raised thousands of birds dubbed “Jersey Squab.” The Great Depression brought the price of squab plummeting to that of chicken, pork or beef, which, according to Wendell Levi, author of the 1941 book The Pigeon, “allowed the housewife to include squabs in her family menus.”

But as factory farming spread its wings, a competitor displaced squab from the American menu: chicken. Agricultural economists found that while you can fatten a pigeon, you can fatten a chicken faster, explains Colin Jerolmack, a professor of sociology and environmental studies at NYU who recently authored a book called The Global Pigeon, due to arrive on shelves February 2013. By World War II, the sun had set on squab’s long heyday.

Meanwhile, as squab retreated from the family dinner table, Americans were coming to know the bird not for its plump place on the plate but for its unwanted urban ubiquity.

Jerolmack’s paper “How Pigeons Became Rats” describes an early instance of public pigeon-hating. Up until the 1960s, some parks even had designated pigeon feeding areas, but around that time a NYC park commissioner referenced the “filth and disorder” of Bryant Park brought upon by “winos,” “homosexuals” and pigeons. Public health officials (inaccurately) referenced the birds in connection with diseases, which helped solidify their low status. By 1980, when Woody Allen declared pigeons “rats with wings,” the birds were widely reviled.

“When you go to a restaurant and ask the waiter what squab is, they’re hesitant to answer,” Jerolmack says. “A lot of people think it’s a wild game animal,” he says. But today, the squab served at upscale restaurants and specialty butchers is usually raised on poultry farms.

Ariane Daguin, the famous French tastemaker behind gourmet ingredient supplier D’Artagnan, has helped Americans forget prejudices against fowl and other fauna. (Her father, Michelin-starred chef André Daguin, remains a star for championing magret, the large breast of the Moulard— the duck breed prized for foie gras—served rare.) In New York Daguin is very well known for foie gras, and, to a lesser extent, rabbit—both meats that are beloved in France but have something of a PR problem in America. Pigeon fits that portfolio perfectly, and under her wing, the bird has found favor here, albeit not under that name. Today D’Artagnan provides most fine Manhattan restaurants with their squab, dispatching 1,800 to 2,500 birds per week.

D’Artagnan offers several breeds of squab, but the King breed is their star. “I really fell in love with that when I arrived here because we don’t have that breed in France, and it’s exceptionally plump,” says Daguin. “I think I’ve been raving so much about it that some people in France have now brought it there.”

D’Artagnan sources squab from a cooperative of free-range farms in California. They’re harvested at about 28 days old, when the squabs reach adult size but before their young muscles toughen. “We have a very funny way to test whether the squab are the right age when they arrive at our loading dock,” Daguin says. “We open the cages, and if they fly out, that means they’re too old.”

In addition to their farm-raised squab, D’Artagnan also sells wild birds called wood pigeons. The animals come from Scotland (game hunted on U.S. soil cannot be legally sold) and are a bit smaller and leaner than the domestic squab, tasting of “true wild game,” Daguin says.

In France, dining on little pigeons is still a big thing. And here in the States, she reports a growing demand among chefs but also on the part of home cooks, who order the birds through her Web site. “People are starting to understand how delicate and rich squab is, and how easy it is to cook,” she says.

As for the city flocks, Daguin says, “unless you are dying and it’s a survival thing, I would never eat them.” But it’s not disease that makes pigeon a poor fit for dinner. Pigeon plagues are more or less a myth; they carry no more infectious pests than any other bird, including chickens and turkeys. Far more treacherous is the sidewalk birds’ diet. “As soon as wild animals are too close to man, they eat things that man rejects,” Daguin says. Jerolmack points out that feral pigeons could be eating rat poison, metals or battery acid—all things that cooking would not neutralize.

Nonetheless—and you might not want to read this while eating—a recent spate of pigeon nabbing has sparked rumors that some street birds indeed end up under knife and fork. A few enterprising individuals scatter birdseed to attract a feathery flash mob, then snatch the birds up in nets and stuff them into the back of vans. Most seem to wind up on live shooting facilities in Pennsylvania. But during his research, Jerolmack met some of these shady snatchers. “I’ve heard—but cannot confirm—that some street pigeons get sold to live poultry markets,” he says.

At such facilities in East Williamsburg and Bushwick, mostly serving a Hispanic clientele, live pigeons can indeed be found alongside ducks and chickens but the animals’ origins remain unconfirmed. “People know they’re not supposed to be selling street pigeons,” Jerolmack says. “If a poultry market is selling them, they’re selling them to customers who assume they’ve been bred.”

And though some media outlets reported a gang of vagabonds roasting pigeon over an open fire last summer in Prospect Park, officials told Edible that those claims were untrue.

Given the city birds’ trash-can diet, even hardcore locavores will want to leave them be. Instead, for eaters interested in tasting one of mankind’s longtime favorite flavors, L. Simchick butcher in the Upper East Side carries Daguin’s farm-raised birds for $22 a pound, or you can head down to Chinatown where frozen birds go for $7.89, or fresh ones for $14. While you’re in the neighborhood, swing by Columbus Park to see if you can spot one of those infamous pigeon-snatchers, or just to feed the birds.

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Pigeon ‘backpacks’ track flock voting

by Pigeon Patrol | Nov 23, 2021 | Bird Deterrent Products, Bird Law, Bird Netting, Bird Spikes, Columbidae, Doves

(PhysOrg.com) — Pigeon flocks are guided by a flexible system of leadership in which almost every member gets a ‘vote’ but the votes of high-ranking birds carry more weight, a new study has shown.

Scientists used GPS ‘backpacks’ to record the flight paths of individual pigeons and then analysed interactions between the birds. Their findings could help us understand the collective behaviour of other animals, including humans.

A report of the research, carried out by scientists from Oxford University and Eötvös University, Hungary, is published in this week’s Nature.

‘We are all aware of the amazing aerobatics performed by flocks of birds but how such flocks decide where to go and whether decisions are made by a dominant leader or by the group as a whole has always been a mystery,’ said Dr Dora Biro of Oxford University’s Department of Zoology, an author of the paper. ‘We found that, whilst most birds have a say in decision-making, a flexible system of ‘rank’ ensures that some birds are more likely to lead and others to follow.’

As part of the study, miniature GPS loggers weighing just 16g were fitted into custom-made backpacks carried by flocks of up to 10 homing pigeons. These enabled scientists to, for the first time, explore spatial and temporal relationships between individual birds and the movement decisions they made at the scale of a fraction of a second.

The team measured shifts in the flight direction of each bird every 0.2 seconds and tried to ‘line up’ these changes across different birds in the flock to determine who initiated any given change in direction and who followed (and with what time delay). The research revealed unexpectedly well-defined hierarchies within flocks, with a spectrum of different levels of leadership which in turn determined the influence individuals had on other birds and on the flock as a whole.

‘Crucially, these hierarchies are flexible in the sense that the leading role of any given bird can vary over time, while nonetheless remaining predictable in the long run,’ Dr Biro said. ‘This dynamic, flexible segregation of individuals into leaders and followers – where even the lower-ranking members’ opinions can make a contribution – may represent a particularly efficient form of decision-making.’

‘Whether such effects come from some individuals being more motivated to lead or being inherently better navigators, perhaps with greater navigational knowledge, is an intriguing question we don’t yet have an answer to.’

The team also discovered that a bird’s position in the flock matched its position in the hierarchy, with individuals nearer the front more likely to be responsible for decisions. Additionally, they found that followers responded more quickly to those flying on their left, confirming observations in the laboratory that suggest birds process social information – such as tracking and responding to the movements of other birds – predominantly through input that the brain receives from the left eye.

The researchers believe their findings could help unravel the decision-making process in many other groups of animals. Further studies may reveal how such a sophisticated leadership strategy confers evolutionary advantage on individuals over a strategy based on a single leader or one in which all members contribute equally to decision-making.

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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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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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A Bone To Pick: Why Do Pigeons Eat Fried Chicken on the Street?

by Pigeon Patrol | Nov 12, 2021 | 4-S Gel Bird repellent, Animal Deterrent Products, Bird Deterrent Products, Bird Law, Bird Netting, Bird Spikes

Poor urban pigeons, they’re raised in the slipstream between double decker buses tumbling along ancient, polluted roads, feeding on grains, bread and whatever else is flung their way. They’re too inedible to fall under the remit of the Game Farmers Association (GFA), and they’re too abundant in cities to be important to the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) meaning they receive no ecological protection. Besides, most of us see them as a blight of flying rats. So they are left to fend for themselves, living in a kind of Dickensian dystopia, thriving on the rubbish the rest of us throw away.

This hunt for survival has taken an unseemly turn. If you live in a city, you will probably have seen it a hundred times, maybe without even thinking about it: pigeons eating chicken bones. They feast on discarded boxes of chicken and chips like they were a Serengeti watering hole, prodding, pecking and poking at the innards of its carcass. They gorge on its flesh near-cannibalistically, before flinging its bones like majorettes twirling batons.

I know we all hate pigeons, but that can’t be good for them, can it? Aren’t they supposed to be herbivores? A spokesperson for the GFA, which focuses on breeding wood pigeons to make them hunt-ready tells VICE: “I certainly haven’t heard of pigeons eating chicken bones. Pigeons, like doves and all of those sorts of birds, are not meat eaters. But urban pigeons are very different to the ones we get in the countryside.”

The feral pigeon, these mongrel bastard birds, have fallen through the cracks. So I turned to the British Trust for Ornithology’s spokesperson and ornithologist himself, Paul Sandcliffe, in the hopes he might know a bit more about why a herbivore bird would want to feast on chicken bones.

VICE: Hi Paul. Why do you think pigeons might eat bits of chicken bones? Are they just feral compared to their rural cousins?
Paul: When we get back to basics, urban pigeons are not that different to rural pigeons, they will feed in large flocks, and once one pigeon is on the ground, it will attract other pigeons. The major difference between these birds, though, is their diet. Rural pigeons are looking for large seeds or cereal grains like rapeseed which are high in energy and can actually fill them. Whereas urban pigeons are just looking for any food that’s available and will test out anything.

So when they’re pecking the chicken they’re just trying it out?
Yes. Pigeons aren’t carnivorous but they’ve come across this potential food, they’ve checked it out, and if it’s edible, they’ll eat it.

Is it possible that the way fried or marinaded chicken is cooked; in flour and batter and sauces makes it less like chicken and more appealing to the pigeon?
I think the big thing making this chicken appealing to the pigeon is that it’s cooked. Lots of birds aren’t specifically carnivorous but if they come across a dead bird they’ll have a peck at it and take some of the meat. I’ve seen it in footage of coal tits in Northern Scotland, pecking at a deer carcass. They can do it because, ostensibly they’re insectivorous [vegetarian except for insects], so they do have this element of a carnivorous diet. But pigeons are granivorous [grain-eating] so their beak is designed for grains. If they come across a corpse they just can’t deal with it; the skin’s too tough to peck through. But if the corpse has been cooked then the texture is soft. So they can peck at it and bits come away. They’re probably not even thinking of it as meat if they’re thinking at all. It’s just food.

Let’s say a pigeon managed to eat a chicken nugget’s worth of chicken, though. Is that any good for its digestion?
I’m not particularly sure there would be a negative impact. Really? But it sounds so gross.
Birds, by their very physiology, won’t eat more than they should eat. Pigeons can’t afford to be fat because it affects their weight and then they can’t fly. And when they can’t fly it makes them vulnerable to predation

Do pigeons actually go through that thought process? Or do they simply stop when they’re full?
It’s just nature for them to stop when they’re full. You could give a blackbird a bucket of worms and it will only eat the amount it needs to survive in that moment and still make a quick escape if needs be. Same goes for a pigeon.

That’s smart. A farmer once told me that chickens will eat concrete to get the right nutrients to make its eggs. Is there any chance pigeons are eating chicken bones to get the right nutrients to make their own eggs?
Female pigeons will be looking for a source of calcium and calcium is hard to come by. They do eat grit and small stones so they probably get a little bit of calcium that way. It’s not impossible that they could eat bones too. I have a wildebeest skull on the shed at the bottom of my garden and over time, the bone has started to break down and become porous and soft inside. Now the blue tits are coming and taking bits of that skull as a source of calcium. I’ve never seen pigeons on that skull, but it’s probably because they’re not agile enough to get up to it. They have to find sources of calcium somewhere, so it could be that the small pieces of bone on the chicken provide that.

So they’re not gross for eating chicken, just resourceful?
All a bird does all day every day is search for food because they can’t have a big breakfast and be done with it. They have to eat small amounts throughout the day. So they’re spending all day every day looking for food and that includes checking out bits of chicken.

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Homing Pigeons Get Their Bearings From Their Beaks

by Pigeon Patrol | Nov 1, 2021 | 4-S Gel Bird repellent, Animal Deterrent Products, Bird Deterrent Products, Bird Law, Bird Netting, Bird Spikes

It has long been recognized that birds possess the ability to use the Earth’s magnetic field for their navigation, although just how this is done has not yet been clarified. However, the discovery of iron-containing structures in the beaks of homing pigeons in a new study1 by Gerta Fleissner and her colleagues at the University of Frankfurt offers a promising insight into this complex topic. The article will be published online mid-March in Springer’s journal Naturwissenschaften.

In histological and physicochemical examinations in collaboration with HASYLAB, the synchrotron laboratories based in Hamburg, Germany, iron-containing subcellular particles of maghemite and magnetite were found in sensory dendrites² of the skin lining the upper beak of homing pigeons. This research project found that these dendrites are arranged in a complex three-dimensional pattern with different spatial orientation designed to analyze the three components of the magnetic field vector separately. They react to the Earth’s external magnetic field in a very sensitive and specific manner, thus acting as a three-axis magnetometer.

The study suggests that the birds sense the magnetic field independent of their motion and posture and thus can identify their geographical position.

The researchers further believe that this ability is not unique to homing pigeons as they expect that the ‘pigeon-type receptor system … might turn out to be a universal feature of all birds’. Equally, this concept might not only exclusively apply to birds, since it has been shown that many animals display behavior that is modified or controlled by the Earth’s magnetic field.

The meaning of these minute iron oxide crystals goes farther than their amazing ability to help pigeons home. Research into how they work has caught the interest of nanotechnologists concerning their potential application for accurate drug targeting and even as a data storage device. The main problem, however, lies in their synthetic production. According to Gerta Fleissner and her colleagues, “Even though birds have been producing these particles for millions of years, the main problem for scientists who want to find benefits from their use will be the technical production of these particles”.

1. Fleissner et al (2007). A novel concept of Fe-mineral-based magnetoreception: histological and physicochemical data from the upper beak of homing pigeons. Naturwissenschaften (DOI 10.1007/s00114-007-0236-0).

2. A dendrite is a branched extension a nerve cell (neuron)

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Tastes Like Chicken

Pigeon ‘backpacks’ track flock voting

Airborne pigeons obey the pecking order

What Makes the Passenger Pigeon Different From All Other Pigeons

A Bone To Pick: Why Do Pigeons Eat Fried Chicken on the Street?

Homing Pigeons Get Their Bearings From Their Beaks

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