Yesterday as I strolled up Park Avenue in the unwonted sun, I noticed two Pigeons engaging in an unusually vigorous dominance contest.
At first it was the usual sort of thing that anyone who has watched Common or Rock Pigeons knows well. The head bobbing. The puffing of the neck feathers. The circling. The beady little orange eyes fixed on each other, sizing up the respective feral foes.
Then, to my surprise, they leaped on each other! Fluttering and clawing like game cocks, they scrabbled for several seconds before parting to resume their circling hostilities. This repeated twice, and drew the attention of several jaded New York onlookers.
“You see,” a man said to his buddy as I passed by, “the woman, she causes all the wars in the world!”
But of course, the two that were fighting were males. The female was just minding her own business, eating a discarded bagel in the gutter some feet away.
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July 7, 2009 at 4:15 pm
The beak that launched a thousand ships?
July 8, 2009 at 1:11 am
What a stupid remark!
I’ve seen pigeons do that, too. In once case, two males were carrying on like that for at least an hour. They would bump into each others’ chests and flap their wings against each other, then back off for a bit, only to repeat the same collision again and again. None of the other pigeons seemed interested in their dispute.