Microlights and pigeons.

[Cranfield]

The area I use to shoot in N Kent, is quite near one of the first microlight club "airfields" and now has a microlight manufacturing/servicing facility built on it.

 

When the microlights first appeared, they could spook a flock of pigeons from over half a mile away.

The birds would lift off the crops and dash to the nearest trees and sit there , until the microlights had gone.

You can assume that it was the noise, but I also believe it was the hawk-like shape of the early microlights, all wide wings and very little body.

 

Yesterday I was watching a flock of about 50 pigeons moving up some disced rape stubble.

A microlight appeared, quite high, not as noisy as the old ones and with a longer fuselage.

The pigeons took no notice of it, even when it turned just beyond the field and returned at a lower height.

 

Is this evolution in pigeons as they adapt to their surroundings, or just a local thing ?

 

It also fascinates me to see the pigeons eating berries on the bushes at Hythe Ranges, when there is live firing taking place about 150 metres away.

[invector]

Like all wildlife, pigeons learn from any out of the ordinary occurences. I believe they are gradually learning about magic roundabouts, and when to avoid them. I once read that the first recorded sighting of a great ***, pecking the foil top of a milk bottle, was somewhere in the south of the country and, within ten years, was copied by other tits much farther north. Might be an urban myth, but quite plausible.