"Malcolm" wrote in message
...

In article ews.net,
Sue writes

"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.

But that doesn't seem to agree with Nick's suggestion that an increase
in population would lead to an increase in mortality and a reduction in
life expectancy which would bring the population back down again.

No, it doesn't, but I don't think Nick is the only person to think what he
thinks about the subject. I have seen it suggested elsewhere that the
farming community came to believe that the traditional autumn culls of wood
pigeons actually increased the numbers surviving the winter to breed the
following spring. If so, that might explain Sacha's observation that the
wood pigeon shoots have been reduced, although not, as you say, her
subsequent observation this has led to an increase in the wood pigeon
population :-)


What's wrong with woodpigeons in gardens, anyway?