"Nick Maclaren" wrote
Malcolm writes:
|
| If the birds weren't shot, the mortality would go down and their
| life-expectancy up.

That is extremely unclear, and might be the converse of the truth. It
will depend very much on how close they are to overpopulation at the
stressful times of year.

It is quite possible that stopping shooting them would cause an
increase in their population, and a consequent increase in their
mortality rate and a reduction in their life expectancy. That is what
often happens to prey species with effectively no predation - as is
the case for wood pigeons in many parts of the UK.

That's the general feeling round here in Norfolk. A couple of decades
back the farmers would have regular organised county-wide woodpigeon
shooting days. That doesn't seem to happen now, and we do have many more
pigeons around. You sometimes see vast flocks of them feeding in fields,
and there are definitely more making a nuisance of themselves in our
garden than there used to be when we moved here in 1980.

--
Sue