#pigeon things

[clockworkjackdaw]

Bird puns

[llisforllama]

A random post about pigeons

So, I'm slightly obsessed with London's pigeon population and really enjoy watching them do their Pigeon stuff. 

Male pigeons, for instance - they see a female and they start puffing up and doing a dance and 99.9% of the time she isn't interested and just wanted to peck at that pool of vom, thankyouverymuch. And he never gets the hint; he's always up in her face, so she has to eventually fly away. At which point the males stand there confused for a second, before seeing another female pigeon and doing the whole thing again - with the same result. They never learn. 

Then there's the pigeons who know how to cross the road, but don't understand that cars won't just stop for them alone. You see them walk (never fly) along the pavements to the crossings. If it's lights, they will wait for the light to change - no lie, I've watched it so many times, those flying rats know when the lights change - then they'll hop off the pavement and cross the road with the humans. If it's a zebra crossing, they walk up to it and then step straight out on to it, even if there's no people. This leads to a lot of near misses as they never seem able to grasp that cars won't stop just for pigeons on a zebra crossing. 

Tube Pigeons - I watched one get on the tube, find a place to stand that was as out of the way as you can get on the tube, as a pigeon; stay there for a few stops, then at what seems to be a very specific place for that pigeon, he very deliberately got off the train and walked down the platform - like he had pigeon business to go to. Pigeon business! What kind of business does a pigeon have?

But my favourite is watching them get food. 

I stood and watched a pigeon trying to get a crisp to line up with the wheels of a bus once. He spent a good 3 buses pecking at this crisp to get it in the the right place for the bus to run it over. All the time you could tell he was panicking in case another pigeon saw what he had, he needed that crisp crushed before any other pigeons found out. My husband has seen a pigeon peck at a slice of bread so violently it ended up wearing the crust. Then tonight - the trigger for this post - I cut down my usual short cuts off Oxford street and came across a pigeon who had found a whole bag of McDonalds. Abandoned. Just for him. 

As I approached, he backed off slowly in case it was my bag. As I walked past, I saw him rush back to it and do a little dance. Pigeons can't smile because of their beaks but I swear this guy had the biggest smile I'd ever seen. He looked so proud with his whole takeaway. 

I don't think he'd realised he didn't know how to get in to it yet.