DO YOU SEE WHAT I SEE?

As this will also be about many things on the periphery of pigeon decoying itself I thought I would share something spotted in Saturday edition of the East Anglian Daily Times whose headline on page 3 read “This ‘lemon curd’ sours the perch for pigeons”. Steve Downes’ article goes onto detail a novel method of deterring feral pigeons in Sheringham in Norfolk. Bird Free Optical Gel relies on an interesting and as yet little known fact about pigeon sight – they are tetrachromats. Not only do they see the world in the red, green, blue, mixes as humans do, they also see the UV light spectrum as a fourth colour dimension. The gel reflects UV light so strongly that the manufacturers claim they think it is fire and so go nowhere near it.

This has all sorts of implications for pigeon decoying from the clothes you wear and what you wash them in (some detergents contain optical brighteners which do a similar job to the gel) to the decoys you use and net vs natural foliage. I hope to cover many of these topics in future posts.

Reflecting UV light from the white neck ring might be the key flock recognition symbol Woodpigeons use – why else would they have green iridescence above it?