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| Country diary: the wood pigeons are on the move | Country diary: the wood pigeons are on the move |
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| A grey silhouette against a linen-white November sky: pointed wings, thick torso, purposeful flight. My first instinct says hawk – maybe a peregrine, even (I saw one over the river, among the Victorian chimneys of the Lower Aire, earlier in the week). But then mind and eye resolve the image and I see the bird for what it is: a wood pigeon, southward bound. | A grey silhouette against a linen-white November sky: pointed wings, thick torso, purposeful flight. My first instinct says hawk – maybe a peregrine, even (I saw one over the river, among the Victorian chimneys of the Lower Aire, earlier in the week). But then mind and eye resolve the image and I see the bird for what it is: a wood pigeon, southward bound. |
| Seen clearly, looking portly and awkward on a bird table, say, or crashing about in the woodland canopy, the wood pigeon could hardly appear less predatory. But we’re not the only ones who can be fooled by that muscular flight-shape. “It sometimes has a singularly hawk-like appearance,” the Victorian naturalist WH Hudson wrote. “Even the wild birds in the wood may be deceived by it, and thrown for a few moments into a violent commotion.” | Seen clearly, looking portly and awkward on a bird table, say, or crashing about in the woodland canopy, the wood pigeon could hardly appear less predatory. But we’re not the only ones who can be fooled by that muscular flight-shape. “It sometimes has a singularly hawk-like appearance,” the Victorian naturalist WH Hudson wrote. “Even the wild birds in the wood may be deceived by it, and thrown for a few moments into a violent commotion.” |
| Late autumn is the season of multitudes. Rooks and jackdaws muster into vast mixed roosts, starling murmurations throw shifting Möbius shapes against the dusk, wetlands thrum with the wingbeats of thousands of waders and waterfowl – and the wood pigeons are on the move, in huge numbers. A vis-migger (that is, a visible-migrant surveyor) might log a flock of 5,000 in an hour of first-light sky-watching here in West Yorkshire. | Late autumn is the season of multitudes. Rooks and jackdaws muster into vast mixed roosts, starling murmurations throw shifting Möbius shapes against the dusk, wetlands thrum with the wingbeats of thousands of waders and waterfowl – and the wood pigeons are on the move, in huge numbers. A vis-migger (that is, a visible-migrant surveyor) might log a flock of 5,000 in an hour of first-light sky-watching here in West Yorkshire. |
| What is curious is that no one really knows where all the wood pigeons are going (or, for that matter, where exactly they’re coming from). The bearing is typically south or west – beyond that, we can’t be sure. They might be in search of balmier conditions in Cornwall or Devon, but those areas show no corresponding uptick in wood pigeon numbers in winter; alternatively, they might be headed for the rich oak woods of France or Spain. | What is curious is that no one really knows where all the wood pigeons are going (or, for that matter, where exactly they’re coming from). The bearing is typically south or west – beyond that, we can’t be sure. They might be in search of balmier conditions in Cornwall or Devon, but those areas show no corresponding uptick in wood pigeon numbers in winter; alternatively, they might be headed for the rich oak woods of France or Spain. |
| Winters in Britain aren’t as hard for these birds as they once were; oilseed rape, cultivated intensively across the countryside, now supplements their winter diet of acorn and beechmast. But I watch the lone wood pigeon barrelling fast across the white, and think of the winter peregrines that haunt the upper air here now. Death would be sudden and explosive, arriving unseen out of the pale sun. | Winters in Britain aren’t as hard for these birds as they once were; oilseed rape, cultivated intensively across the countryside, now supplements their winter diet of acorn and beechmast. But I watch the lone wood pigeon barrelling fast across the white, and think of the winter peregrines that haunt the upper air here now. Death would be sudden and explosive, arriving unseen out of the pale sun. |
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