Good of you to drop in on us, Wingo
WINGO arrived in our lives with not so much a polite ring of the doorbell but a loud thud on the dining room window. Eyes blinking, left wing dangling at a gruesome angle, he staggered like a Saturday night reveller trying to get home on pigeon toes. The powder marks from wing feathers imprinted on the double glazing told their own story. Weighing a good pound a half and flying at more than 50mph, the barrel-chested wood pigeon had thumped with a velocity that should have killed him instantly. Wingo is made of stern stuff.
By luck, the crash-landing saw him recovering under the bird feeders dangling at the bottom of the garden. Messy house sparrows and starlings feasting overhead were soon sprinkling him with revitalising sustenance.
Promise of easy pickings have since seen Wingo become a visitor as regular as the paperboy. Last year’s Beast from the East and its insidious little brother never deterred his daily hedgerow promenading, sucking up every scrap of falling bird seed. One look at that dodgy wing, primary feathers splayed like a poker hand, decided his moniker.
These days he no longer worries about offerings from above. The ground gets copious sprinkles of seed whenever the feeders are topped up. Wingo has shown his gratitude by bringing Mrs Wingo and even baby Winglet – whoever said you never see baby pigeons – to dine.
Ornithological purists will look superciliously at our naming of a wood pigeon. Anthropomorphising wild creatures is verboten in fusty academia. Our terms of endearment for Wingo, however, have provided us with a remarkable insight into his life: the feeding frenzies amid the periwinkle; ablutions in the bird bath; the direction he flies off to roost and the timings of his parental duties. Perhaps we have stumbled on why wood pigeons are such a suburban wildlife success story.
The RSPB’s Big Garden Birdwatch has witnessed a 950 per cent increase in wood pigeon visits to the nation’s backyards since it began 40 years ago. Between 1967 and 2016 overall numbers increased by 157 per cent so that the UK breeding population stands at 5.3 million pairs. The popularity of oilseed rape as an agricultural crop is thought to be a major factor. Wood pigeons love devouring the fresh shoots. Yet why the surge in suburbia?
Year-round food courtesy of devoted garden bird lovers appears to be giving the wood pigeon a remarkable survival boost, especially for a species capable of producing six broods a year.
IT IS not all one way. Wood pigeons repay observers with shows of astonishing behaviour. There are the flamboyant courtship displays that see puffed-up males pursuing diffident mates as well as lots of aggressive set-tos with interlopers. Their soft coos ring from rooftops.
When I asked the British Trust for Ornithology’s Paul Stancliffe how long we can continue to expect Wingo’s daily visits, I was given a surprise response. The average wood pigeon life expectancy is around three years but one bird clocked up 17 years and eight months and Paul revealed he was a wood pigeon fan, too.
“When I tell people that the wood pigeon is my favourite bird I am often met with disbelief but the simple fact is that it is true,” he says.
“If you take time to really look at a wood pigeon it soon reveals itself as a truly beautiful bird, a mix of pinks, greys and blues with a wonderful yellow eye. They really do bring a taste of the countryside to urban gardens.”