Pigeons: The Fascinating Saga of the World's Most Revered and Reviled Bird

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Some of our partners may process your data as a part of their legitimate business interest without asking for consent. And the dove of peace turning into the flying rat maybe says more about what we’ve done to ourselves than it does about these formerly appreciated, and now horribly maligned, little birds.

Pigeons were highly valued for sending messages (obsolete with the invention of the telegraph), for their meat (obsolete with the emphasis on chicken), and for their guano (obsolete with the rise of factories manufacturing fertilizer). We found this book important for the readers who want to know more about our old treasure so we brought it back to the shelves. Charles Darwin loved them (much of Chapter One of On the Origin of Species is devoted to them), as did Pablo Picasso who not only painted them but named his daughter after them (Paloma, his “little dove”); the Mughal emperor Akbar, Queen Victoria, inventor Nikola Tesla, painters Claude Monet and Henri Matisse, head of the fashion house Maurizio Gucci, Yul Brynner and Walt Disney—pigeon fanciers all. In this comprehensivework he offers to share his experiences with fanciers, novices and people considering making a start in this wonderful and worthwhile hobby.

My main gripe is so much presumably interesting information missing here: comparison of different pigeon populations by great city (London vs. Bound in full tan polished calf, double-ruled in gilt; six-compartment spine tooled in blind and gilt, with black title labels. Dan has been fascinated with pigeons since his youth when he used to feed them breadcrumbs at the local park. The group reasons that if we can identify irrational behaviors in animals, such as gambling, we might discover common brain mechanisms related to such seemingly complex behaviors. As this print on demand book is reprinted from a very old book, there could be some missing or flawed pages, but we always try to make the book as complete as possible.

Try to remeber that you do not need to be an expert on the subject,best to use this imformation same as turning on a lightswitch. THE PIGEON is, without a doubt, the best, most authoritative, English language publication on domesticated pigeons.

For someone who doesn't have much basic knowledge on birds in general, this was a great introduction to pigeons.Here’s the thing about pigeons: if you’re one of those people who hate them and think of them as “flying rats”, well tough, because it’s our own fault. I've always felt that pigeons got a bad rap, and now, thanks to Rosemary Mosco and her book "A Pocket Guide to Pigeon Watching", I feel a bit vindicated. This was one of the best non-fiction books I have had the pleasure of reading in a while, chock full of information but anything but boring and dense.

When the pigeons were only somewhat hungry, they suddenly behaved like humans and chose just the pea. It’s all too easy to treat them as disposable pests, but when you’ve seen an injured one, or have been, as I was, unfortunate enough to witness one disappear under the wheel of a passing bus, you remember that they are living feeling beings who deserve not to be kicked around or hurt for no reason. Illustrated with over 800 photographs and nearly 800 pages long, this hard cover book is one of the finest ever printed on pigeons. When we start to talk about J W Logan who I believe started in the sport around 1870 and developed a long distance strain of his name sake I can't resist .According to behavioral ecologists, Zentall recounts, animals should never gamble because evolution has honed them over many thousands of years into optimal foragers. When new words pop up, she tells you how they’re pronounced, and she explains complex topics from the ground up (for instance, instead of assuming readers will remember their biology classes from school or pointing them elsewhere for an explanation, a short primer on genetics is included before the section on pigeon genetics). If the original book was published in multiple volumes then this reprint is of only one volume, not the whole set and contains approximately 24 pages. There is some form of the bird on nearly every continent, and while most of us think of the common domestic pigeon (or rock dove) when we think of a pigeon, some of them are very unique and quite beautiful. This new negative view of them probably explains why books about feral pigeons are so few and far between, and Rosemary Mosco has helped plug the gap.