[birding] Those remarkable forest pigeons

[howard bruner]

Hi Chris

 

I second Joel's comment - please send your band-tailed pigeons to me.  I was involved in research on basic ecology of the band-tail in the early 90's here in western Oregon and came away with a deep appreciation for a remarkable creature.  Let me share a couple findings with you.  

 

The breeding season is May through Sept. and multiple nesting attempts are fairly common.  The nest is a flimsy stack of small twigs that one can see daylight through.  The female lays one egg - more uncommonly 2.  Mortality for eggs, squabs, and fledged young is high with predation from the usual closed-canopy suspects - hawks, accipiters, jays, owls, ravens, raccons, squirrels, snakes, and felines.  

 

Mortality of adults results from encounters with all of the above (except ravens, jays, and squirrels) as well as human hunters.  A great book on the harvest and decimation of the historic flocks is: 

 

Mathewson, Worth. 2005. Band-Tailed Pigeons: Wilderness Bird at Risk.

 

For me that summer in the Coast Range is a glad memory hallmarked with golden dawns in dripping fog forests seeking to uncover the secrets of an iridescent migrant that seemed more appropiate to the jungled tropics than the rain-forested PNW.  We learned that we could set our watches to the invariant timing of switch of the sexes for uninterrupted brooding of the eggs.  The Male had the day shift and relieved the female at 10:00 AM each morning and the female came back at 5:00 PM for the night shift.  To watch from 30 meters below as they interacted with (yep you guessed it - cooing - among other pigeon murmuring and chuckling) on a thin branch in the swaying canopy was to discover a forest treasure unknown to most.  The reliance on supplemental minerals from ground and water sources in order to fortify the glandular 'milk' fed to squabs seemed a jump from Aves to Mammalia.

 

When the red elderberry reached a certain density and abundance recognized as a critical threshold by discerning pigeon gormands and the berries were the color of a fire engine - then we would find the remnant gatherings of a wild and social denizen of the greatest coniferous forest on this earth - and realize we were privey to a spectacle ancient and glorious.

 

H  

 

 
 		 	   		  
_________________________________________________________________
The New Busy is not the old busy. Search, chat and e-mail from your inbox.
http://www.windowslive.com/campaign/thenewbusy?ocid=PID27925::T:WLMTAGL:ON:WL:en-US:WM_HMP:032010_3
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.midvalleybirding.org/pipermail/birding/attachments/20100315/f6a32023/attachment-0001.html