July 16: Flocks of doves
Jul. 16th, 2010 11:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
neverspentOn my drive home, on a certain stretch of telephone wire high above the street, I've been seeing a flock of mourning doves lined up, resting in the evening sun. Doves are so common, they're not something I would normally notice, but I'm used to seeing common pigeons (rock doves) in that spot, not mourning doves. Also, I'm used to seeing mourning doves in ones and twos and threes. I know they can flock, but I rarely see it, not in the way you see dozens of pigeons lining a wire or a rooftop.
Mourning doves are lovely. I wish them well in their congregating, and I hope they don't have to fight the pigeons for the turf they've claimed. (I'm very fond of them, but it's not for nothing that pigeons get depicted in children's programs as streetwise thugs.)
The flocking was enough to remind me of the passenger pigeon. I was doing some research recently and just needed to know when the passenger pigeon went extinct, but of course I stayed to read the whole article, and several of the reference articles. The interesting thing I learned was that the passenger pigeon used to be one of the most numerous birds on the planet, and that their flocks were enormous. I mean billions. The only animal with larger groups was the locust. It was reported that when the passenger pigeons migrated, the flocks could be a mile wide and take hours to pass over. People would go to their roosting sites, use a decoy bird (in a terribly cruel method I won't describe here), catch the birds as they landed, and crush their heads: hundreds, thousands of birds, which they sold to poor people in the cities as food. It wasn't that they thought they couldn't make a dent in the population, either -- eventually the population decline was widely recognized, but the "hunting" continued. Billions of birds, and in a few decades, people ate them into extinction. Passenger pigeons' mating habits depended on there being large, dense flocks, and once those were sufficiently thinned out, the breeding stopped happening. Once people decided to preserve the birds, it was too late. Martha, the loneliest passenger pigeon, died in a zoo in Cincinnatti in 1914. The whole story is the saddest thing I've read since... well, since I read about the extinction of the Great Auk.
By Louis Agassiz Fuentes in Birds of New York (Wikimedia Commons)
Mourning doves are lovely. I wish them well in their congregating, and I hope they don't have to fight the pigeons for the turf they've claimed. (I'm very fond of them, but it's not for nothing that pigeons get depicted in children's programs as streetwise thugs.)
The flocking was enough to remind me of the passenger pigeon. I was doing some research recently and just needed to know when the passenger pigeon went extinct, but of course I stayed to read the whole article, and several of the reference articles. The interesting thing I learned was that the passenger pigeon used to be one of the most numerous birds on the planet, and that their flocks were enormous. I mean billions. The only animal with larger groups was the locust. It was reported that when the passenger pigeons migrated, the flocks could be a mile wide and take hours to pass over. People would go to their roosting sites, use a decoy bird (in a terribly cruel method I won't describe here), catch the birds as they landed, and crush their heads: hundreds, thousands of birds, which they sold to poor people in the cities as food. It wasn't that they thought they couldn't make a dent in the population, either -- eventually the population decline was widely recognized, but the "hunting" continued. Billions of birds, and in a few decades, people ate them into extinction. Passenger pigeons' mating habits depended on there being large, dense flocks, and once those were sufficiently thinned out, the breeding stopped happening. Once people decided to preserve the birds, it was too late. Martha, the loneliest passenger pigeon, died in a zoo in Cincinnatti in 1914. The whole story is the saddest thing I've read since... well, since I read about the extinction of the Great Auk.
By Louis Agassiz Fuentes in Birds of New York (Wikimedia Commons)