Rollers back in the News
Roller Pigeon fanciers are back in the news with a disturbing but illuminating video on CNN revealing the nature of those busted in a recent sting operation. I still receive an occasional cryptic email regarding past blog entries about this particular subject (posts linked below). Some of these fanciers would have you believe accipiters, like the Cooper's Hawk, are responsible for major declines in native songbird populations, which apparently provides enough justification for them to take the law into their own hands. However, the real justification behind their despicable criminal behavior is that they feel they have a right to kill federally protected hawks because their non-native pet pigeons are caught as prey items when released in training or competition flocks.
Back in July, I responded to one fancier's piffle:
"From fossils collected in California, New Mexico and Florida, Cooper's Hawks have existed in North America since at least the late Pleistocene (half a million years ago). Birds that constitute traditional prey items for these and other raptors somehow managed to flourish for tens of thousands of years in their presence, including the Passenger Pigeon."
Bill Schmoker commented:
"If pigeon fanciers supplement this natural feedback system with their easy targets, they really can't blame the hawks for doing what they do. It would be like me training Labrador Retrievers to swim in the Farallon Islands and getting angry at the Great White Sharks for eating them instead of their normal seal diet, and demanding that the government grant me an exception to wildlife protection laws so I could kill them in order to protect my unnatural, un-vital activity."
Links:
Birds of Prey and Rollers
Winged Thugs
CNN Video: Pigeon breeders target hawks
Birder's World Magazine: An outrage against hawks and falcons
Cooper's Hawk image © 2008 Mike McDowell
posted by Mike McDowell @ 5:40 AM
3 comments
3 Comments:
How terrible! Being a birder myself (while in Canada,) I knew plenty of people who raised pigeons. They at least had enough respect to realize that "nature is red in tooth & claw" & that a certain number of losses were inevitable. I'm shocked by that CNN video. Shocked & terribly hurt.
I can tell you from Germany, that here we too have some individuals who illegaly kill raptors like Peregrines, Northern Goshawks or Eurasian Sparrowhakws because they kill pigeons. Sometimes poison is used.
In Spain, Bonelli's Eagles (an endangered eagle with only about 1.000 pairs in Europe) are sometimes in conflict with pigeon owners.
I think anyone who owns pigeons has to take the risk of some pigeons getting killed by hawks. The birds just want to survive. We can't blame them for that.
Markus
The worst offenders are the pigeon fanciers who raise "rollers." This particular breed is exceptionally vulnerable to hawks, and also to other kinds of mortality, because it was specifically bred to fly in a bizarre, crippled way. To me, it's an act of cruelty to breed these pigeons in the first place.
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