A Pigeon's Crop
Not long ago I examined a pigeon that had been shot. Its crop was full of acorns. It had swallowed between twenty and thirty, and the bulges made the bird seem deformed, for the acorns rolled beneath my fingers as I felt the crop. It is hard to say how many acorns a pigeon is capable of eating. Between forty and fifty would not be beyond a greedy bird. A friend tells me that he once shot a pigeon that had gobbled up eighty-five peas. From the appearance of the contents of the crop, the peas had been freshly taken. A score of pigeons on a field of peas can make an alarming mess of a crop in a day or two. Pigeons are flighting a lot just now, round the bare oaks and elms, over the winter wheat and the rape stalks. Their food is anything green. Most of the birds are visitors. By nesting-time the majority of them will have gone. The residents are small in number but enough, as the farmer says, -not without vehemence, for they will be over his spring sowing as wary as rooks or jackdaws, and will take their toll when the field is set up in stooks.
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