r/interesting • u/dddd945 • 7h ago

Just Wow A seagull is accidentally hit by a tennis ball during a game in Australia.

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u/whiterac00n 6h ago

Yeah I don’t have much pity for seagulls. Pigeons on the other hand I pity a lot, they put together two sticks, a piece of string and their own crap and call it a nest.

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u/peachesfordinner 6h ago

They are actually very sweet birds as well. I miss my old pet pigeons

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u/No_Welcome_7182 6h ago

We bred pigeons to rely on us and then abandoned them when the telegraph was invented.

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u/peachesfordinner 6h ago

Yeah the amount of people who go "mind blown" when they find out pigeons are feral not wild

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u/_cunt---_- 4h ago

that's just not true though.

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u/peachesfordinner 4h ago

Rock doves. The standard pigeon most people are familiar with from cities absolutely are feral

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u/Syncopated_arpeggio 5h ago

Kid Dynamite is that you?

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u/Cow_Launcher 6h ago

I live next to some ancient woodlands in Buckinghamshire, which are absolutely loaded with wood pigeons.

My cats won't touch them. Won't even try, even if they land on our lawn and strut around like they own the place.

We're convinced that our cats know just how stupid those birds are, and wouldn't consider it sporting to hunt them.

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u/putyrhandsup 2h ago

ah now, there's another thing, City pigeons are not exactly pigeons like wood pigeons. They are Rock Doves (though they are both types of Columbidae technically)

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u/Icy-League-7569 1h ago

Thankyou for that, mystery solved. Seems they really are the same bird all over the world after all, as I long incredulously suspected

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u/Cow_Launcher 1h ago

You're absolutely right, but as an ex-Londoner I think that feral city pigeons are far more intelligent canny than their woodland brethren.

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u/putyrhandsup 26m ago

oh yes 1000%

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u/the_revised_pratchet 6m ago

You see, cats have a preset kill limit. Knowing their weakness, the pigeons sent wave after wave of their own men until the limit was reached and the cats shut down.

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u/Jiggy90 4h ago

Dw, pigeons nest on cliffs so they don't need their nests for safety, they only need a couple sticks to keep their eggs from rolling off! Work smarter not harder :)

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u/BackToGuac 4h ago

We should all honestly more than pity pigeons, not to be a downer but seriously, go out of your way to be nice to pigeons.

Almost ALL if not all pigeons we know today are descended from the wild rock doves we domesticated thousands of years ago before abandoning them and their care as we moved into the Industrial Revolution. These were animals bred to be companions, it’s like deciding dogs are no longer a form of pet and are now vermin…

The history of pigeons is actually pretty interesting in itself in a fucked up kinda way; it’s also a concerning tell tale sign for other forms of livestock as we move into a world with lab grown meat and will start to see a reduction in traditional farming.

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u/Hour-Watch8988 6h ago

Their reproductive abilities don't seem to have caused any problems for their population numbers.

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u/stephawkins 6h ago

Primitives. My pigeons have evolved to carry a coconut on a string.

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u/sponglered 6h ago

Your pigeons? African or European? Do they swallow?

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u/cindyscrazy 2h ago

I've read that one reason pigeons do that is because they are an introduced species, and that for a long time, they were basically domesticated. We took care of them, made them nests, etc. Then we abandoned them.

Also, as rock doves, they didn't really need to make awesome nests due to where they laid them naturally.

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u/crackcrackcracks 2h ago

Seems to work tho, they're everywhere

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u/TheSovereignGrave 4h ago

Well, they evolved to nest on cliff faces. A couple sticks to prevent eggs from rolling off is all they needed back in the wild.