Comment on Apparently they are actually for birds???
SupraMario@lemmy.world 1 day agoPigeons are really dumb birds, how they have survived as a species is a mystery to me. We have a few pairs on the farm that have had babies and out of the 6-8 that have made it to maturity, 2 of them we had to rescue cause they just jumped out of the nest and couldn’t fly yet. We’d put them back in the nest for a few days and then just give up and raise them in the aviary until they were fully grown and then release them. Awesome birds as pets, but dumb as a box of rocks in the wild.
how they have survived as a species is a mystery to me
Domestication is how they’ve survived. They’ve got odd little nests because they’re from a warm area and they really just need a few sticks to keep the egg from rolling out of the cliffside pockets they naturally nest in.
We’ve transported them to areas they never evolved to live in, set them loose, and mock their struggle to survive.
Decimating their habitat is one thing, I will not tolerate the mocking of pigeons!
There’s a couple of pigeons that made a nest in my backyard two years ago. It’s located right next to a wall that’s frequented by cats. It’s also right next to the back door, so every time we go out the birds leave the nest in a panic, leaving the chicks behind. That is, if there would be any chicks - the nest has such big holes that the eggs just fall out onto the ground.
sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 day ago
I mean… don’t pigeons and a number of other birds… essentially have some method of navigating / spatial awareness that is still not well understood by science?
Basically, yeah, they dumb as fuck, but also, they seem to have something approximating a sixth sense that we do not comprehend.
HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world 21 hours ago
trial and error?
sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 21 hours ago
Unless I am mistaken, a fair number of studies have determined that that is insufficient as a method/means to explain the capabilities that they routinely display.
Like one theory is that they somehow functionally have a literal metalic compass in their brain, or potentially … basically an ability to sense geomagnetic subtleties and anomalies, and use those as waypointz and guidelines, but… again I might be out of date here, but nobody has yet proposed a non problematic or well verified hypothesis.
SupraMario@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Yea, I mean I’m not saying that to be mean. As I genuinely like the birds. They will talk to you when you get near them in the barns and the two we raised are still hanging out on the farm even years after we released them.
sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 day ago
Oh me too!
I don’t like… dislike pigeons, they just are kinda dumb.
Same with horses, I love horses, but goddamnit are they stupid, lol.
Like, it’s not an insult to identify that different kinds of animals have different kinds of mental capabilities.
I’m just trying to point out that… while pigeons are ‘dumb’ in a lot of ways, they do also at least seem to have something akin to a superpower, so if you judged conscious entities by that metric, presumably they would all think that we are basically mentally disabled.
Something does not need to be highly intelligent to be loveable, appreciated.
SupraMario@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Nope %100 makes sense. And horses are definitely the second dumbest creature on the planet. They will try and kill themselves daily. Our vet always said that if a horse wants to kill itself, it’ll find a way even in circular padded room. And we have a few that on a daily will try to do shit that makes you think how they’re still alive.