I always die a little hearing the flying rat thing. I get that they can be really annoying, waking you up, trying to lay eggs everywhere. But—having helped to care for many injured, sick, and unwell animals, pigeons _and_ fancy rats among them—I can't help but to feel sorry for how they are treated.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2TlXi3_Fyyg
‘If it became necessary immediately to discard every line and method of communications used on the front, except one, and it were left to me to select that one method, I should unhesitatingly choose the pigeons’, wrote Major General Fowler, Chief of Signals and Communications of the British Army, after the First World War.
On today's podcast Tom and Dominic are joined by Gordon Corera, the BBC's Security Correspondent and author of 'Operation Columba: The Secret Pigeon Service', to discuss the often under-appreciated role of pigeons throughout the course of history.
In my French Parisian city of Courbevoie, pigeon houses where eggs are shaken to sterilize them, and re-introducing magpies solved the problem - the now sparser population is fine. Magpies and crows devastate pigeon nests.
Also, the expansion of greenery led to shifting the pigeon population from mostly columba livia, which nests on rocks (and therefore on buildings) to mostly columba palumbus - which nests in vegetation and thus doesn't make a habit of shitting on buildings.
My household had to change our sleeping schedule because of these stupid rats. In Europe they are both protected and invasive at the same time.
As they suffer predation by magpies, the more spikes that humans put in the nest, the more attractive became to nest on it, it seems.