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WHAT TO DO WITH PIGEON GEESE?

by Pigeon Patrol | Jul 27, 2021 | Pigeon Patrol's Services, Pigeon Predators, Pigeon Spikes, Pigeons, Pigeons in the News, Raccoons

While most Canada Geese spend the spring and fall migrating back and forth between their winter and summer habitat, some sub-populations of the Canada Goose have sprung up in many urban and suburban areas, living there year-round. In many cities they have become quite the pest – hanging around popular areas, hissing at children, and leaving their infamous waste seemingly everywhere.

Our Senior Scientist Dr. Jeff Wells spoke with host Marc Montgomery on Radio Canada International’s The Link, a daily show that covers a wide range of news stories. Dr. Wells explains how these, as he likes to call them, “pigeon geese” came to be and how they are different from wild migratory geese. He also weighs in on New York City’s plans to kill hundreds, if not thousands of them, and ways to make good out of unfortunate situations…

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Homing Pigeons are Forgetful Too

by Pigeon Patrol | Jul 27, 2021 | Bird Deterrent Products, Bird Law, Pigeon Control, Pigeon Droppings, Pigeon Patrol's Services, Pigeon Predators

If it makes you feel any better, humans aren’t the only animals that forget things. Researchers have found that homing pigeons do the same. The new findings, they add, suggest an underlying continuity across the human and animal world in how the brain works.

The knack of remembering and forgetting is the brain’s way of filtering information to manage its limited storage capacity. For example, you briefly store information about trees and cars around you in your working memory, but if someone tells you to focus on a speeding truck, your brain uses a process called executive control to remember that object longer. Meanwhile, you forget the others. In humans, this filtering is performed by the prefrontal cortex.

To test whether the avian brain has a similar filtering mechanism, Michael Colombo, a neuroscientist at the University of Otago, New Zealand, and colleagues subjected homing pigeons to a memory test. First, the researchers trained the birds to know that a high tone means they should remember an object, while a low tone means they can forget it. They then showed the birds one of two shapes (circles or dots) or colors (blue and green). After a bird pecked three times at the image, the researchers sounded a tone. Birds that heard the remember cue fired up neurons in a region of their brain analogous to the human prefrontal cortex (as measured via implanted electrodes), Colombo’s team reports today in PLos Biology. And those birds did, in fact, remember the objects: 79% of the time, they correctly pecked at the original object again when shown multiple images 3 seconds later. In contrast, birds that heard the forget cue did not exhibit sustained activation of the same brain area, and only in about 44% of cases did the birds correctly identify the original object. Thus, the researchers argue the birds use a similar mechanism as humans to filter their memories.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Wartime hero pigeon Paddy honoured with fly-past

by Pigeon Patrol | Jul 19, 2021 | Pigeon Patrol's Services, Pigeon Predators, Pigeon Spikes, Pigeons, Pigeons in the News

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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WHAT TO DO WITH PIGEON GEESE?

Homing Pigeons are Forgetful Too

Birmingham pigeon fanciers inspire play

Pigeons on trains

Birmingham Roller

Scientists give extinct passenger pigeon a place on the family tree

Testing pigeon memory in a change detection task

Wartime hero pigeon Paddy honoured with fly-past

Local hero

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