Have birds got a built-in cooling system?

THERE’S a large elder tree on my patio and a pair of wood pigeons have nested in it.

The foliage on the tree is very dense and there’s also a lot of ivy growing up it. This means that I can’t actually see the nest.

But I can hear what’s going on up there because I like to sit under the tree on fine evenings and keep an eye on what’s happening in the natural world. And I’ve been hearing something rather strange.

Periodically there is a mad thrashing of wings from the nest that goes on for about half a minute and then stops suddenly. It’s been puzzling me and I’ve thought about it over a couple of days and come up with a theory.

This was happening during the hot weather we had last week and my theory is that one or other of the pigeon parents was fanning the nest with its wings to cool down either eggs or young birds.

But I’ve never heard of this behaviour in wood pigeons, or indeed any other species of bird, and I can’t find any references to it in the literature. So I’m starting off this week with a question.

Has anybody reading this come across anything similar, possibly in a nest where you can actually see what’s going on?

Or has anybody read about birds using their wings as fans to cool down a nest? If so, I’d love to hear about it.

Having started with a question I’ll continue with a mild rant. I live deep in the countryside in a very beautiful place. I’ve become addicted to the business of sitting out on warm evenings and enjoying the ambience. I watch birds coming in to roost and track the progress of a fox two fields away by their alarm calls as they spot it.

As it gets later I look for bats and check what species of moth are coming to the outside light. And I love the peaceful country sounds. On still evenings birds sing nearly as much as they do at dawn, lambs call to their mothers and occasionally I hear the long-drawn-out hoot of a long-eared owl coming from the forestry plantation to the north.

BUT THE countryside is a changing place and two things have started to interfere with my simple pleasures.

The first is helicopters. There is an astonishing number of them around. About a dozen people in the immediate area own them, either individually or in a syndicate.

I don’t know very much about helicopters, apart from the obvious fact that they’re extremely noisy. But it seems to me that a lot of them are not capable of flying in the dark so the pilots are all hurrying to get back to base in the evenings when I’m out listening to the birds. And there don’t appear to be any regulations preventing them from flying over my garden at a very low altitude.

Although I have an uninterrupted view of fields, woods and bog between the patio and a distant horizon, there are a lot more houses on the lane than there used to be.

And the other thing that’s beginning to annoy me is that most of my neighbours are commuters and many of them get home quite late in the evenings. Then, at this time of year, they have something to eat, change their clothes and get out the ride-on lawnmower, or the strimmer, sometimes even a chainsaw.

Picture me, an old fogey sitting in his armchair on his patio listening for owls — with a lawnmower to the left of me, a strimmer on the right and a twin Robinson overhead. Jean Paul Sartre put it rather neatly when he said: ‘Hell is other people’.

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