PIGEONS OF Nepal

Mating habits of the pigeon

Pigeon Squab and
Egg in Nest

The pigeon mates for life and can breed up to 8 times a year in optimum conditions, bringing two young into the world each time. The frequency of breeding is dictated by the abundance of food. Pigeon eggs take 18/19 days to hatch with both parents incubating the eggs. Young dependant pigeons are commonly known as ‘squabs’.

Pigeon Nest
with 2 Eggs

Both parents feed the young with a special ‘pigeon milk’ that is regurgitated and fed to the squabs. Each squab can double its birth weight in one day but it takes 3 days before the heart starts beating and 4 days for the eyes to open.

Pigeon Squab -
3 Days Old

When squabs are hungry they ‘squeak’ whilst flapping their wings and as a result they are also commonly known as ‘squeakers’.

Pigeon Squabs -
10 Days Old

At approximately 2 months of age the young are ready to fledge and leave the nest. This longer-than-average time spent in the nest ensures that the life expectancy of a juvenile pigeon is far greater than that of other fledglings.

SNAP SHOT OF PIGEON!!!!!!!

Pigeons are big business

Champion Racing
Pigeon

We normally think of the pigeon as being an unwelcome guest in our towns and cities, but most of us are unaware that racing pigeons can be worth huge sums of money. One racing pigeon recently sold for a staggering $132,517.00! The 3-year old bird was a champion racer, beating 21,000 other pigeons in one long distance race. For this reason he was bought by a British company that breeds racing pigeons for ‘stud’. One very happy pigeon! The previous record price for a racing pigeon was $73, 800.00.

http://www.pigeonclubsusa.com/faircount_facts_info_pigeonfacts.htm

REGULAR PIGEONS

DARK BLACK

Pigeon disasters

Passenger Pigeon

Probably the greatest disaster to befall the species was the extermination of the passenger pigeon in North America in the early part of the 20th century. It is estimated that there were 3-5 billion passenger pigeons in North America at the time. Flocks of 100,000s of the birds would blacken the skies as they flew over, but early settlers managed to wipe out every last bird by 1914 through over-hunting.

Passenger Pigeon

Great Pigeon Race 1997

A more recent and quite bizarre disaster befell tens of thousands of racing pigeons released from Nantes in France as part of a race held to celebrate the centenary of the Royal Pigeon Racing Association in England. 60,000 pigeons were released but only a few birds ever arrived back at their lofts throughout southern England.

One theory suggests that the sonic boom created by Concorde as it flew over the English Channel, at the precise time the pigeons would have been at the same point, completely disorientated the birds, throwing out their inbuilt navigation system.

http://www.txtwriter.com/onscience/Articles/pigeons.html

http://pigeonexpresso.com/famous-pigeons.html

SOME EXTRA BREEDS

Pigeons as lifesavers

Although the pigeon is one of the most intelligent of all the bird species, man has found limited uses for the birds other than for the purposes of sport, food and as a message carrier. A team of navy researchers, however, has found that pigeons can be trained to save human lives at sea with high success rates. Project Sea Hunt has trained a number of pigeons to identify red or yellow life jackets when floating in the water. Lifesaving Crew

Lifesaving Crew

The pigeons were not only found to be more reliable than humans, but they were also many times quicker when it came to spotting survivors from a capsized or sinking boat. The pigeon can see colour in the same way that humans do but they can also see ultra-violet, a part of the spectrum that humans cannot see, and this is one of the reasons they are so well adapted to lifesaving.

http://www.pigeonclubsusa.com/faircount_facts_info_pigeonfacts.htm

Project PigeonWatch from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology

LAL SARA

should be "watch this breed. This breed is known as LAL SARA in Nepal."

Pigeons in the news

Reuters, News Agency

One of the world’s most famous news agencies, Reuters, started its European business by using trained homing pigeons. The service was started in 1850 with 45 pigeons carrying the latest news and stock prices from Aachen in Germany to Brussels in Belgium. Although a telegraph service between the two countries existed, numerous gaps in the transmission lines made communication difficult and slow. The birds travelled the 76 miles in a record-breaking two hours, beating the railway by four hours.