Wood pigeon

THE wood pigeon is a far more hated than loved bird in the UK.

To the farmer they are a decimator of crops and to the bird lover a fat thief of everything on a bird table they can get their grubby beak on.

But, even as maligned as they are, they have a lovely gentle call that can’t fail to give a country atmosphere. I can’t bring myself to dislike these lumbering oafs.

Throughout all of British history until 1912, the wood pigeon was known as the “ring dove”. A fairly strange change, but it helped to differentiate it in writing from the similar sounding “collared dove” that would come to colonise the UK some 40 years later.

The wood pigeon lives everywhere except the very highlands of Scotland and with over 10million in the UK alone, they are by far our most common.

They have many regional names such as culver, quist, cooshie doo and cooshat. The name clatterdove will seem apt to anyone who has ever heard the cacophonous clatter of their wings as they try to take off.

The wood pigeon is a serial pest and will stuff their crop with almost any vegetable plant, grain or seeds they can get their beak on. The introduction of large fields of oilseed rape in the UK has only led to the swell in wood pigeon numbers.

The fact that they have always been culled as a pest has led to them always being available on the British dinner table. It was written in the 1500s that pigeon meat makes “a man’s loins slow and dull; who would be lusty should not eat this bird”. You heard them! It was also believed pigeons were useful for a plethora of insane medicinal

NOW is the time for yellow flowers! Gorse are in flower on hills, primrose in fields and roadsides, lesser celandines in woodlands and, of course, daffodils! You might also spot sneaky purple violets!