Words of the Day: it must be love, love, love...
Pigeons courting is a somewhat amusing and yet rather heartwarming sight. A pair have been going through the motions on a rooftop in my line of sight for a few days now. From what I know, the feral pigeon (aka the rock dove) pairs up year in, year out, so why they have to go through so much effort to come to an accord is rather beyond me. Surely a sensible creature would say "ah, it's you again, ok, let's do this thing" and just spend all their energy breeding and raising their young. I don't know, really. Perhaps it's something to do with them having to reaffirm that both birds in the relationship are up to the task. Either way you look at it, though, pigeons are clearly doing something right, because there are a LOT of them. More than 200,000 breeding pairs in the UK alone (stats from the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds website). That's more than 400,000 birds. Now consider all the other bird species they are in competition with, and that's some feat. You may not like them very much, but you have to admire the effort.
It's a bit snowy here right now. Not a lot, but a bit. Enough to make the walk into the department this morning quite interesting. And not only in a 'falling over on the ice' sense, but also aesthetically. My morning detour through a local park turned into a sejourn through a winter wonderland of crunchy, untouched snow, past an iced over pond where the ducks did their slapstick routine just for me and a foreign student eagerly snapping away with a digital camera. It always makes me happy to go through the park, as I may well have mentioned before, but today's journey made me that little bit happier than normal. There were even people making a snowman, which is cool, even if it did bear an uncanny resemblance to the MSN Messenger logo.