Country Life
By IAN NIALL YEARS ago we had pigeon pie often, but as with hare and rabbit, one can become satiated with such things, and the taste for them goes for ever. The other afternoon I was going along the road out of the village when I met a man with a good string of pigeons he had shot. He told me he had waited some hours for them and was looking forward to a nice pigeon pie, although he had some of those thin 'foreigners' in the bunch, pigeons he took to be Scandinavian ones on account of their dark plumage. I must say that I had always thought this too, until quite recently, when 1 read a paper by Dr. A. McDiarmid on the subject. It seems most likely that the small, dark-plumed pigeon is not a migrant, but a tuberculous bird, which, had • I not had my fill of pigeon, might have put me off eating them, although tuberculosis in pigeons is rendered harmless in the cooking pot, I under- stand. Pigeons, however healthy, vary a great deal from season to season and are at their best when feeding on fresh green shoots such as young peas. They are never so tasty in mid-winter, when greenstuff is short.
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