They burst from the trees and the mixture of clattered vegetation and the sound of stiff fletch upon the air revealed them instantly as wood pigeons. The species is so abundant these days that in the minds of many naturalists it now occupies a form of negative space. They look at them primarily to dismiss them.
Yet the occasional singleton at least requires you to notice the diagnostic white half-collar on the neck, or that curving band of white across the short wing, or even just the flat, even hammering of its broad beat to reassure yourself of its identity; that it is merely the commonplace creature you assumed and not something more engaging, like a sparrowhawk or lone stock dove.
Yet our indifference overlooks the wonderful contributions made by wood pigeons. I love the coarse throaty song, with its characteristic five-note motif, that's so much the background music to British woods. I love too those strange mock battles performed by males, when they strike each other with open wings and fill the treetop with the noise of their hollow bluster.
I love most of all those moments in midwinter when they can seem sublimely beautiful – the flock coming down on to a field and the broken silver arc of their underwings turned purer than white by reflected snow.
These experiences should force us at least to recall that the wood pigeon can not be blamed for the darker symbolism it has recently acquired. Since the 1960s the population has increased by 170%.
The species' catholicity in food and habitat, as well as its wider adaptations to humans, means that it thrives in our massively simplified countryside, where so many others birds now fail.
Wood pigeons go on increasing and while we may not notice their abundance, visiting friends from Africa or Spain are alert to a countryside, which to them, seems full of nothing but wood pigeons. It has become less an expression of abundance as an emblem of loss. Today pigeons represent a biomass not much less than that of all the songbirds in Britain.
