Feral Pigeon migration

[steveduke]

Do Feral Pigeons migrate like 'normal birds', as opposed to just hanging around a given area in a sedentary way?  I ask because a few times recently I have seen several flights of 10 - 20 birds heading purposefully northwards over the sea off Marske.  They are quite a way out and are obviously quite different and behaving differently from the pigeon-loft / allotment birds which zoom around in similar-sized flights in our area.  Do the Skinningrove sea-watchers see them as well moving up the coast?

[ETJ]

I've always assumed the birds were racing pigeons using the coast as an easy form of navigation. These extracts from the BTO Migration Atlas and BWP show Feral Pigeons don't move far :

86% of wing-tagged birds in Manchester were subsequently sighted within 90 m of the ringing site. Almost all remained within 1 km, with only 5 (out of 1269) moving more than 1.3 km, and one bird managing to move 6.4 km

For Rock Doves (ancestors of Feral Pigeons), the median distance between ringing and recovery dead was 0.5 km. The largest movement was one bird that moved 28 km between breeding season and winter.

The only regular movement of Feral Pigeons recorded in Britain is a small passage through Fair Isle, but this is thought to be birds moving between the northern isles.

In the rest of the world, there are local movements in seasonally arid regions (Oman and Nigeria), and in Brno (Czechoslovakia) birds commute daily from the town centre to feed on farmland.

So, unless anyone's got some more information, I'm sticking to the racing pigeon hypothesis!

Eric

[steveduke]

Ah yes...thanks Eric. I feel a bit silly as I hadn't thought of racing pigeons actually racing home! That would explain why they're flying so purposefully and obviously heading out of the area as fast as they can.  And, like you say, we know lots of birds use the coastline to aid their other methods of migration navigation.
Cheers,
Steve