Pigeon plucked by mystery attacker

MY WIFE and a lifelong school friend, walking along a west Cork road, saw a bird on the road ahead of them and, as a car approached, saw it take off, carrying another bird in its talons.

It dropped its cargo (which they, at first, thought was a rat) as it flew over the ditch and continued across a field.

What surprised them was that the corpse-carrier was no bigger than the corpse. It must have had great strength to lift it almost vertically, albeit of dropped it quite soon.

When the friends reached the spot, they found the lovat-grey feathers of a wood pigeon on the tarmac. The feathers were probably the combined result of a fright-moult (shedding feathers to distract an attacker) and of a hurried plucking. The plucker was almost certainly a peregrine falcon. Wood pigeons are a favoured prey species of peregrines; it would, one hopes, have returned to finish its plucking and its meal. Peregrine falcons are rare and magnificent birds and nature has dictated that they should be carnivores and that killing should be their trade.

Wood pigeons are, we know, familiar and attractive birds with plump, shiny-pink breasts, white neck patches, red beaks and lovat-grey mantles. They are seen and heard almost everywhere. Their repetitive, resonant cooing of summer evenings can be more mind-numbing than soothing; they go on, and on, and on. Where we lived in London, we heard them in the trees along the street in front of the house, and in the trees along the heath at the back of the house. There was no escaping them.

And then, there was the mess they would deposit on the bonnet of the car. This was often larded with ivy berries and was highly corrosive if left for a week when one was away on holidays. However, they are another of the Great Creator’s creatures and do not deserve to end up plucked on a west Cork road, having had their necks broken by an avian missile hitting them at 100mph out of a clear sky.

Currently, wood pigeons are building their ramshackle nests in low trees. One can see them on the still leafless branches. They were the easiest nests to rob when we were children, and they always contained two virgin-white, almost spherical eggs.

We only robbed only one or two. Once we had a specimen, and had blown out its contents — having made a pinhole in each end — and put it in our collection, we didn’t require any more.

It was, of course, reprehensible to rob birds’ nests and there was no excuse other than that we were too young to realise that every living thing is a part of the whole ecology, and that the ecology breaks down when parts are taken from the chain. It is some comfort to know that wood pigeons will raise as many as three broods a year.

Along the roadside trees, we also see magpies nests, domed structures similarly constructed of twigs, and seemingly ramshackle too. Ramshackle they may appear, but small boys poking their hands down the tunnel entrance often found their bare arms scratched in the process, as if the magpies had instinctively lined the entrance with thorny twigs, nature’s barbed wire.

I have discovered five heron nests in the copse below our house. This count was achieved not by scanning the treetops at the cost of neck-ache but by noting areas of crowded white droppings on the forest floor, these betraying the nests above.

The nest sites being only five minutes from my perch in front of this computer, I rise to stretch my limbs and take a look at them once or twice daily. Birds are now always sitting on the nest, meaning that there are eggs or hatchlings.

The ‘adopted’ heron that comes to our courtyard for free lunches is looking somewhat frayed. The white crown is less luxuriant than a month ago, when it was dressed for courtship, and the trailing breast feathers are somewhat bedraggled. No doubt, the rigours of parenthood are responsible; egg-laying and sitting on a nest for long periods must take it out of one. I’m beginning to think that ‘our’ heron is a female bird.