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Tuesday, February 8, 2000
Perils of peregrine: Pigeons picked off by preying falcons
Withholding edible scraps, seeds also thin flocks of pesky, plump birds
I asked the readers of this column to let me know if they had observed hawks in town eating pigeons. A number of readers called to tell they had, indeed, seen the hawks successfully catch pigeons and consume them.
Barbara and Art Olsen live near the intersection of Ennis Joslin Road. They say a colony of pigeons has been multiplying in the fields on both sides of the intersection. A peregrine falcon has discovered the birds and the Olsens have watched it on several occasions making stoops on the flock. All his attempts they witnessed, however, had been near misses.
Bill Blakenship's business, Boat Stop, takes him past the same corner often. He too had noticed the pigeons and the peregrine. But Blankenship has seen the falcon connect. He described watching the predator make two unsuccessful passes, then a third that knocked his victim out of the air, apparently killing it with the one blow. Following the dead pigeon to the ground, and stripping off its feathers, the falcon enjoyed a hearty meal.
Willard and Juanelle Haskell, who live not far from the same intersection in the Pharoah Valley area, recently watched a large hawk that they were unable to identify. It was sitting on the ground, picking feathers from a pigeon. It ate the breast of the bird, then flew off. Another time the same bird appeared in their yard and attacked a squirrel at their bird feeder. The small animal escaped.
On Del Mar Boulevard, in an established neighborhood near Six Points with many trees, Amy Roper looked into her yard one afternoon to see a Cooper's hawk perched in an anaqua tree. Roper's father formerly taught biology, she said, at Del Mar College, so she has been around birders much of her life. This accipiter stayed on the ground while it dressed and ate its prey. Only when it was disturbed did it fly to a tree to perch.
Pigeons should properly be known as rock doves. They have proliferated, along with house sparrows and European starlings, by adroitly fitting themselves into a niche in the food chain close to dwellings of man. At the same time their natural predators, falcons, almost became extinct when DDT was the pesticide of favor in this country.
Many people consider an overabundant pigeon population to be a nuisance. Such establishments as the Corpus Christi Country Club and H-E-B Grocery Stores have tried various devices to discourage the birds roosting in the eaves of their buildings and launching themselves messily over their parking lots.
Pigeons frequent places where people feed them, either intentionally or by discarding edible scraps. If you want to discourage pigeons, don't feed them. If they come to your yard feeder, stop putting seeds out for a while.
Let us rejoice that hawks and falcons are making a come-back and that some savvy individuals in their tribe are coming to our town to do the work that is rightly theirs: culling the pigeon flock.
Phyllis Yochem, a Corpus Christi
resident, has studied birds of Texas since 1960.
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