Writing for the Birds – an urban, coastal nature diary

Saltdean-Brighton-Peacehaven-Rottingdean-Newhaven

Columba livia
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Have you ever lived with pigeons on the roof? If not, you’ve missed one of life’s enchantments. For three years these modest birds graced our roof and, now they have moved on, life isn’t the same.

Affectionately known as rock doves, it’s predictable that a discerning few choose the rocky white cliff tops of Saltdean as their home. Pigeon bones, preserved as fossils, show they have inhabited high rocky ledges for over 20 million years. Search and rescue teams in seaside communities used to train them to spot brightly coloured life jackets floundering at sea; long before there were lasers, pigeons pecked away at a keyboard in emergency helicopters to indicate sightings of drowning people.

Pigeon brains detect the earth’s magnetic fields like a compass, which makes them instinctive homing birds with geographical awareness that people have exploited since long before Julius Caesar sent pigeon messengers home to proclaim his distant conquests. Even in our total-tech century, journalists and medical workers on unreachable islands have attached film or blood samples to tiny pockets in designer bird-vests, and flown them for urgent analysis, ‘pigeon post’.

I miss the fluttering of Columba livia, settling and resettling to find the comfort spot; their gentle padding feet shuffling in the night, and telling of another presence above my human-centric life. I still watch for those multi-coloured feathers to drift onto my balcony; pink, green, silver in the sun, bidding me to value the commonplace. I miss their rounded, downy greyness and twenty-eight colour morphs. But mostly it’s the purring, the soft guttural mantra soothing summer afternoons and autumn nights that is missing. When roosting, the sound is ‘oh-oo-oor’, like a baby’s soft snore; anyone with a baby visiting the house will know the calming effect of baby-breath. You can hear their sound on the link below.

Listen to Columba livia’s nesting song:
http://www.xeno-canto.org/270097 

But then came eco-guilt and the solar panelling! It felt like a good idea and has definitely saved on energy consumption. The pigeons liked it too. They took a shine to centrally heated living standards and cosied-up between the solar panels and roof. And despite a superior pigeon-intellect cited in the birding literature, which applauds forty pigeon heroes in WWII dispatches, they abandoned their nests in old buckets the Bodger had left out for them, but laid their eggs under the warm ‘sauna’ panels, resulting in a summer dodging ill-fated eggs rolling and smashing onto the balcony.

Reluctantly, I called for The Bodger, who equally half-heartedly put up roof ladders and mounted skywards to the solar realm of perplexed pigeondom, where he spent macho man hours clearing the guttering and collecting buckets of home-produced muck for the rose beds. The Bodger’s voice, when he descended, was insistent; no soft cooing, but a strident alarm call – to the roof man. And now we have plastic spikes, void of personality and conspiratorially silent, where there were soft feet pattering overhead at daybreak. 

Pigeons on the roof 

In the early morning
And at noon
My cliff-top room hums
With the cooing and purring 
Of pigeons on the roof,
Unseen companions 
Who share my airy days.
But this day, bare
On the concrete path,
Lies a perfect fledgling
In newborn near-nakedness.

A few fine feathers 
Show awkward, soft
On feeble outspread wings;
Pink flesh glowing, 
And a ring of gentle blood
Seeps at its silent throat.
Jostled from the roof
At its first big hurdle
To land in our alley
By bins and the arching jasmine. 

The raucous seagulled cliffs
Do not note the absence
Of one hatched pigeon 
This indifferent spring, 
But I am enriched
By sharing its moment
Of exiting quietness;
And my humming room 
Hears how that silky, 
Conversational rumbling
Is missing a voice today.

Dawn Austin Locke © 

Dawn is a qualified proofreader and copy-editor supporting authors, businesses, and academic writers. She is contactable at editor@dawnproofperfect.co.uk or via her website www.dawnproofperfect.co.uk or on Facebook Dawn ProofPerfect. 

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