Putting a stop to cabbage patch pests

I WAS supposed to go to Spain for a short break that was a birthday present for my wife.

But then the volcano erupted and we had to celebrate at home.

But even clouds of volcanic ash have a silver lining. I now had some extra time to catch up on work in the vegetable garden, which was several weeks behind schedule due to the long winter.

The first job was to prepare the cabbage patch, which took most of a day. In the evening I put in a few plants, leaving the rest for tomorrow. But when I got up the next morning the plants had been pulled out of the ground. They hadn’t been eaten, just uprooted. In fact many of them were still healthy enough to re-plant. After I’d done that, and added a few cauliflowers and broccoli, I went indoors for coffee.

When I went back out I was puzzling over what might have uprooted the plants. The mystery was solved instantly. A fat wood pigeon took off from the cabbage patch and a few more plants had been pulled out of the ground. On close examination there were some beak-sized areas of young leaf missing but this was much more like vandalism than a serious feeding frenzy.

And I’ve always liked wood pigeons up to now. I like that soothing, musical cooing sound they make and the way, on fine spring days, they fly up vertically and then glide back down with their wings extended. It always looks as though they’re enjoying themselves. And, though I don’t want to shock any vegetarian readers, I’ve always enjoyed eating wood pigeon. I think it’s probably the best of all Irish wild meats.

Another rather endearing thing about them is the way they feed their babies. A day or two before the eggs hatch (wood pigeons normally lay two eggs) both the male and the female start to produce something called crop milk. This isn’t really milk, only mammals can produce that, but it’s quite similar. It’s a yellowish white substance with the same sort of consistency as cottage cheese and is extremely high in proteins and fats.

For the first week of its life a baby pigeon is fed exclusively on this. The parent bird gapes open its beak and the baby dips in and feeds from the bird’s crop. Over the next week the baby is ‘weaned’ as the parents progressively add suitably soft and digestible adult food to the milk.

I’ve never actually seen this happening. Wood pigeons nest all around me but they build their nests, rather flimsy platforms of twigs, in small trees or large bushes with heavy leaf cover, which makes it hard to watch what’s going on. Around here they prefer to nest in hawthorns, though I’ve also found the nests in confers and birches.

To my knowledge, all species of pigeons and doves produce crop milk and the only other birds that do anything similar are flamingos.

But the fact that wood pigeons make good parents, admirable though this may be, did not solve my problem with the cabbage patch. It was an awkward size and shape to cover with plastic netting and if you do this the young plants inevitably grow through the mesh and get damaged when you take it off again.

In the past I have used discarded sound-recording tape stretched over seed beds and young plants. Birds dislike the way it flutters and glistens in the breeze. But analogue recording tape is as rare these days as a nesting corncrake. In the end I solved the problem with some horribly gaudy toy windmills designed for kids. Pigeons don’t like these either.

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