[HN Gopher] Feral pigeons and the London Pigeon String Foot and ...
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Feral pigeons and the London Pigeon String Foot and Rescue group
Author : nickwritesit
Score : 44 points
Date : 2024-06-22 10:54 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.bbc.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.bbc.com)
| junto wrote:
| I always had a negative view of pigeons as being "flying rats",
| but someone pointed this out to me that humans domesticated them,
| revered them, bred them, used them to deliver messages and then
| the telegram and telephone came along. These new communication
| tools made them superfluous to our needs so we abandoned them.
|
| Put in that context it's rather sad.
| timthorn wrote:
| Gordon Corera wrote a good book covering their use in WWII:
| https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/37933332-secret-pigeon-s...
| ljf wrote:
| My (mildly interesting) pigeon story:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39689815
|
| I think they are amazing, and as you say they were once
| integral to our lives, now just a pest.
| Loughla wrote:
| That's a fun story.
|
| We raised roller pigeons after a pair showed up at our farm.
| They obviously escaped from somewhere, as they were red and
| tame. Until we knew what they were, we assumed there was
| something wrong with them, as they couldn't fly without doing
| loops and flips. That's what they're bred to do.
|
| And they're delicious, as a side note. . .
| ljf wrote:
| I'm I'm eating pigeon (which we used to a lot as a child) -
| I was always told that Wood Pigeon was the tastiest - but I
| can't say I could tell the difference.
| gerdesj wrote:
| An ecosystem (world) has all sorts of niches. Pigeons (Rock
| Doves) are simply living and evolving according to
| circumstances they encounter. Some pigeons have been given
| medals during wartime (1). All organisms do what they do,
| because that is what they do. You do too, but you get to be
| retrospective about it on internet forums. Pigeons don't ...
| yet.
|
| "Flying rats". OK so what is wrong with rats? They often
| perform a initial clean up role and live blameless lives, if we
| want to think of them in a positive way - they don't care. Rats
| and many other "pests" tend to get "out of control" thanks to
| mostly human interventions: dumping waste inappropriately and
| the like.
|
| (1) https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-tayside-
| central-17138...
| fire_lake wrote:
| It is.
|
| I wonder what a humane method of population control looks like?
|
| Pigeon feeding can lead to rats so it seems reasonable to ban
| that.
| jonathrg wrote:
| Feeding birds will only lead to rats if you give them the
| wrong food or too much. Otherwise they will eat it all up and
| there will be nothing left for the rats.
| richardw wrote:
| My wife and a few friends were into helping feral cats. I did a
| few stints. Built a shelter, helped bake cookies for sale to
| generate funds etc.
|
| I remember doing predator-prey models at uni. The issue is that
| the population will just grow until it's at some kind of
| capacity. Cats are easier to capture and spay, but an issue there
| is that for every cat that lives longer, many thousands of native
| animals are going to die. But the cat is cuter and visible, so we
| help it.
|
| For eg pigeons, what limits the population? You can't capture and
| neuter every bird, so population restriction is environmental. If
| you add food, rather than 1000 birds you now have 1100 birds,
| etc. Ideally we're being kind to a balanced population of birds
| that play some part in the local ecosystem, rather than one that
| we created and out-competes other birds because we give it a
| hand.
|
| Not an expert. Experts, what's the best outcome here?
|
| Edit: emigrated to Sydney. Took 3 moggies with us at great
| expense but they're now inside cats so we don't annihilate the
| local wildlife and irritate all the neighbours (who are
| rightfully very protective of their native animals). Cats are
| happy. A friend's mom looked after about 17 feral kittens. Now 17
| grown cats that eat a lot of food made of presumably gentle cows.
| This is not well-thought out. But kittens are cute and have
| utterly hacked humans.
| ajb wrote:
| [Edit: I had misread the above comment, which is not saying
| 'per year']
|
| While cats do indeed kill wildlife, I suspect that "thousands
| of animals per year" is a big exaggeration even for ferals. It
| might be true if their sole diet was wildlife, but in most
| cases the diet will include a lot of contributions from humans
| (from people who like cats, scavenging in bins, and
| occasionally, theft). And of course almost all of the wildlife
| they do take will be mice, which is the original reason we live
| with cats. Even today, if a cat near you is taking thousands of
| mice per year, few people would prefer to live with thousands
| of mice.
|
| Pet cats, of course, don't take anything like this number. I've
| seen figures of <5 per year, and that's consistent with my own
| cats.
| richardw wrote:
| If you're going to quote, make it an accurate quote :) I
| didn't say per year. And the amounts of animals killed by pet
| cats are very much not accepted as 5. Maybe you're presented
| with 5.
|
| "Cats have played a leading role in most of Australia's 34
| mammal extinctions since 1788, and are a big reason
| populations of at least 123 other threatened native species
| are dropping.
|
| But pet cats are wreaking havoc too. Our new analysis
| compiles the results of 66 different studies on pet cats to
| gauge the impact of Australia's pet cat population on
| Australia's wildlife.
|
| On average, each roaming pet cat kills 186 reptiles, birds
| and mammals per year, most of them native to Australia"
|
| https://www.nespthreatenedspecies.edu.au/news-and-
| media/late...
|
| "scientific evidence does not support the popular use of cats
| to control urban rat populations, and ecologists oppose their
| use for this purpose because of the disproportionate harm
| they do to native wildlife"
|
| "Surveys of cat owners find they often view the depredation
| of wildlife as a normal thing that cats do, and rarely feel
| an individual obligation to prevent it.[55] They may
| experience some level of cognitive dissonance toward the
| subject, because when surveyed they're more likely than the
| general public to believe that cat predation isn't harmful to
| wildlife"
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat_predation_on_wildlife
| ajb wrote:
| My apologies, I misread your comment.
|
| I think it's safe to say that the number of animals killed
| by pet cats is disputed. It will also be quite different in
| different places; my figures come from my area. The
| situation is also very different in Australia, where cats
| are a recent introduction, and the native population is
| naive to them, versus countries where this is not the case.
| I certainly don't defend letting cats outside in Australia
| or New Zealand.
|
| In other places it's more a question about equilibrium. All
| wild animals die, either from predation, starvation, or
| disease; predation may not be the worse death. Nor is
| predation necessarily a sign of disequilibrium (IE, cats
| causing a falling wildlife population) - at equilibrium
| it's still possible for 100% of deaths to be by predation,
| as the older animals get slower and are predated. The exact
| effect of pet cats is therefore quite involved, and
| counting the number of kills won't tell you the whole
| picture even if you could get that figure.
| richardw wrote:
| No problem. And you're right it's never simple.
|
| If cats weren't there, native animals would be doing the
| predation. We enable cats to out-compete other animals.
| Islands make it easier to measure the impact but
| obviously this plays out similarly in all places. We like
| cats, help them where we can, have devoted much of our
| internet bandwidth to them, and there's no way that is a
| positive for other animals in the ecosystem. The level of
| impact is debatable but it's not anywhere near positive.
|
| I lived in South Africa. Tons of cats in cities and very
| few species of birds. Go to a reserve with "proper"
| wildlife and there are tons of bird species and no cats.
| They're utterly out-competed when the playing field is
| level.
|
| Going back to the article, if we feed pigeons they'll
| increase in number until we get a new equilibrium. So our
| current state isn't an act of god, and by doing more of
| the same we'll just exacerbate the problem. Humane
| management is surely a better idea, like the fake eggs
| approach described by another commenter.
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40771093)
| ktothe wrote:
| > For eg pigeons, what limits the population?
|
| Not an expert myself but here in Germany people build pigeon
| shelters and swap out the eggs with fake eggs.
| fartfeatures wrote:
| I'm guessing these guys have never had Pigeon-Induced Severe
| Sleep Exhaustion Disorder. I ended up chronically PISSED due to
| some loud ass pigeons nesting outside my window. 4 hours sleep a
| night over a period of months sucks.
| lostlogin wrote:
| If you've ever seen a pigeon nest, it's actually hilarious.
|
| It'll be a couple of sticks just plonked on a ledge. They can
| be very proud of their nests and after the 9 seconds of effort
| put into the job, who's to blame them?
| card_zero wrote:
| Simply go with the flow, wake up at dawn, and go to sleep when
| the sun sets, like the pigeons are telling you to. You'll be
| leading a more natural life, and you'll avoid the risk of being
| eaten by a fox due to hopping around on the ground after dark.
| fartfeatures wrote:
| Ha. That does seem to be the only logical solution.
| Ozzie_osman wrote:
| There are parts of the world where pigeons are bred for food in
| the same way chicken might be, and in fact, it can be considered
| a delicacy.
|
| When I was a kid (in Cairo) my father let me keep a small pigeon
| coop on the roof. We'd buy a few, then you have to keep them
| locked in the coop for a couple weeks so that they "home" there.
| After that, they'd be allowed to leave and fly wherever they'd
| like, and they'd always come back to the coop to nest at night.
| You'd feed them once a day or so by throwing some grain on the
| floor outside the coop, and they'd learn to associate a cue (like
| waving a flag) with feeding time and fly back to eat.
|
| That said, I could never bring myself to eat them (not because of
| disgust, but just because at that point they felt like pets).
| card_zero wrote:
| I observed a group of urban pigeons and their nesting habits
| for a couple of years (you gotta have a hobby), and I started
| getting upset by threats to their success, like when jealous
| humans put up netting, or when a buzzard shows up, or when a
| chick gets sick and dies ... until it occurred to me that I was
| more invested in their lives than they were. They care deeply
| about the competitive _process_ of making chicks, defending
| nest sites, getting the best twigs and food, and about the eggs
| ... but once they hatch, if a chick vanishes (they usually only
| have two at a time), the parents ' reaction is "Yay! Time to
| make more! Let's remodel the nest and get busy!". They're at it
| again within half an hour, with no sign of distress. I guess
| that's life as a prey animal.
|
| There are quaint old picturesque dovecotes in a lot of historic
| places ... those were for harvesting the squabs, to turn into
| pies. On reflection I think this was a reasonable arrangement
| for keeping things in balance (a modest proposal, even).
| RealityVoid wrote:
| I find them interesting but wound up disliking them greatly
| because they make a mess. When you make them mistake of not
| having the heart to ruin their nest and have to shovel buckets
| full of poop at the end, and them getting poop on your terrace
| daily, you kind of get sick of them.
|
| I would not mind them as much if they did not shit everywhere.
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