Twice every day, soon after dawn and a little before dusk, wood pigeons come down on country roads to feed. Not for them the tyre-stamped carcasses that are peeled off the asphalt by crow beaks. Pigeons are grit peckers, heads down like chickens in a yard. They gobble up tiny stones to act as so many grinding pestles in the mortar of their digestive tract.
While crows have adapted to life in the fast lane with cunning and calculating judgment, wood pigeons are masters of last-minute escapology. But not always. Last autumn, I noticed one standing in the middle of a straight, wood-edged road, head lowered, picking away at the ground. I drove on, slowed and waited for it to fly. It flew all right: just a few metres in front of the car it gave a tiny hop that brought it just above the bumper. I heard a soft thud and then, through an explosion of down, a grey bundle smacked against the windscreen, after which I looked in the rear-view mirror to see the poor bird’s body cartwheeling off towards the verge. Weeks later, I was still picking out pale feathers that had wedged firmly on impact in the radiator grill.
History seemed about to repeat itself this week with another wood pigeon, this time on an open road, without even hedges as screens. This bird lifted off five metres or so in front of my braking vehicle. It could have slipped off to safety on either side of the oncoming car, but instead it tried to outpace me. The white stripes on each wing looked like the markings on a plane, but this was hardly a jet fighter. Its wings flapped up and down, up and down, in what seemed like slow motion. The stripes on this one-paced flier began to look like crosshairs, I could see the overlapping feathers in the stub of its tail.
The road began to bend but by skill or sheer luck the bird kept flying straight ahead, so that it careered off over a field, still holding to that same, regular, up, down, up, down beat. Was it even aware that it had been just a feather’s length away from death?
