Thursday, August 17, 2006

Urban Birdwatching

On my walk around the neighborhood this morning, I came across some birds gathered around some bread that someone had left behind. I do not know if this was left specifically for the birds, or whether they had pulled it from a nearby trash can.

This flock was mostly rock pigeons.

The pictures of individual birds do not give a sense of what a scrum this was. Here is a larger portion of the flock of pigeons gathered around. There were several slices of bread, though it was hard for all the birds to get to it at once. The picture below shows a few examples of rock pigeon plumages.

A few house sparrows tried to get in on the action, too. They had a harder time because the larger-bodied pigeons were able to push them around. But the sparrows still got an occasional nibble.

For more birds and other critters, see the Friday Ark, which turns 100 today.