Feral animals in the urban environment

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Feral pigeons originated from escaped domestic pigeons, themselves derived from wild rock doves around 5000 years ago. The domestic pigeon’s origins probably lie in the Neolithic, though the first evidence of domestication comes from Mesopotamian figurines dating from c.4500 bce (Simms 1979). This bird was quickly adopted by many cultures and spread westward throughout Europe (probably arriving in Britain with the Romans) and eastward into India and China. When domesticated pigeons first reverted to the wild is not known, but the second-century writer Plautus reported that feral pigeons were very tame and lived on the rooftops in Rome. Feral pigeons were known in London by the late fourteenth century, for the Bishop of London complained that the building of nests on St Paul’s Cathedral had led to people throwing stones which broke windows and statues (Simms 1979). Pigeons were well-established in London by the seventeenth century (Lever 1987), and by the mid-nineteenth century were commonly nesting elsewhere in urban Britain and indeed Europe. While pigeons were probably widelydistributed actual numbers sharply increased during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Until the early twentieth century, pigeons benefited from spillage of grain used to feed the horses that drew wagons and carriages; this important source of food disappeared with the arrival of motor vehicles. During the twentieth century, the genetic stock of feral pigeons has been enriched through breeding with escaped racing birds. In many parts of Europe numbers fell during the Second World War because of a lack of food, then picked up again during the 1950s. Urban feral pigeons are common in much of south and south-east Asia and parts of the Far East. Domesticated pigeons were introduced to South Africa in 1654 and some went feral shortly afterwards. Such a story was repeated in Australia (domestic pigeons introduced in 1788, ferals noted in the late nineteenth century); New Zealand (1850s); Latin America (various dates); Canada (1606); and the USA (probably in the 1820s) (Lever 1987).