northeast-flora-and-fauna

High wire acts are dangerous activities for humans that require skill and coordination, but are no big deal for most of our bird friends like this Feral Domesticated Rock Pigeon . These Rock Pigeons got the "domesticated" part of their name because their ancestors were domesticated Rock Pigeons brought here by European settlers. (Rock Pigeons are not native to North America.) And they get the "feral" part of their name because some of those domesticated pigeons escaped into the wild. (Many of them are very comfortable foraging for food around and even from humans.) These birds have a lot of plumage variation, though this individual's bluish-gray coloring with 2 dark bands on the wings is fairly typical. Generally speaking, I'm pretty suspicious that I've got a Rock Pigeon when I see a colorful pigeon/dove-shaped bird. In any event, it's easy to confidently perform high wire acts when you can cover up a clumsy mistake by just flying away. May 10, 2023...

Let's anthropomorphize a little bit. Is this White-breasted Nuthatch giving me the New Jersey "You looking at me?" stare? The little fella at least looks like it might be giving me some "attitude", though that was the only challenging-look picture I got of it. The other pictures looked more like a little bird doing its job of foraging on a tree trunk. Still, some New Yorkers like to think their pigeons act like tough guys , so if we want to attribute something similar to our nuthatches I'm sure we can dig up some anecdotal evidence. April 14, 2023 at Sourland Mountain Preserve Photo 272129860, (c) jpviolette, some rights reserved (CC BY-NC)

For Throwback Thursday I thought I'd (attempt to) briefly discuss the long, complicated history of our Rock Pigeons (aka Rock Doves).  First off, there are considered to be 12 subspecies of Rock Pigeon kicking around today, suggesting that these birds were adapting to a widespread number of environments well before human civilization emerged. Once human/pigeon relationships emerged, things only got more complicated: The Rock Pigeon is native to Eurasia and North Africa, but not to the Americas. There used to be a wildly common pigeon native to the US called the Passenger Pigeon , but massive hunting and habitat loss by Europeans led to their extinction. By at least 5000 years ago, ancient Mesopotamians domesticated (formerly) wild Rock Pigeons; they're considered to be the 1st bird that humans tamed. They may have initially domesticated them for food but also used them to send messages. Around the same time Ancient Egyptians were using them both as message-carriers and in ritu...

For Throwback Thursday, here's a bird that's probably associated with our cities more than woods, meadows or wetlands. It's a Rock Pigeon  (AKA Rock Dove); I've mentioned before that there's no clear taxonomic difference between doves and pigeons .  Technically calling them Rock Doves is slightly old-fashioned; that used to be the common name for the birds (in English) before the American Ornithologists' Union and the British Ornithologists' Union decided to switch to Rock Pigeon for complicated reasons. (The scientific name didn't change so there wasn't a need to get worldwide support for the name change. I don't know if English speakers in Canada, Australia, India, etc. had any input though.) I suppose to be more precise, I could have referred to the bird as a Feral Pigeon , which is a wild version of the Domestic Pigeon , which is in turn a tame version of the Rock Pigeon. (The Feral Pigeon and the Domestic Pigeon together comprise a subspeci...