I’ve robbed three eggs from the nest so far this spring, being constructed on various shelves and crevices on my NYC terrace (and being fiercely defended by Mama PIgeon, puffing herself up to fearsome size but no match for my broom) and have some questions:
!) Can I eat the eggs? (I wouldn’t in a million zillion years, but what if anything would happen if I made an omelette instead of pitching it down my trash compactor chute? If I served them up to some unsuspecting guest, would he or she be able to tell there was something funny about the eggs?)
Can any pigeon be trained to be a homing pigeon? I passed a building on the El tonight with hundreds of the filthy things roosting, and thought “Huh, I’m trying to get rid of mine, and here’s a collector.” Is he collecting the same things I’m trying to rid myself of?
Is it bad luck that they try to hatch their stupid eggs on my terrace lately? I never had any nests until spring of 2004, when I was fascinated by the Nature channel happening outside my living room and let the nasty things be born there. I assumed the stupid filthy things were far too dumb to remember “Hey this terrace is a good place for a nest” but are they smarter than I’d thought?
You certainly should be able to eat them without a problem. I have no idea how they taste, though. Probably like Cracker Jack, or maybe cigarette butts.
Any Domestic Pigeon is pretty good at homing, and some people do keep regular street pigeons. However, the true “homing pigeon” is a specialized breed, selectively bred to be especially good at homing.
Birds will often try to re-nest where they have successfully raised a brood, so yeah, you’re screwed until Mama Pigeon gets the message that Dr. Jekyl has been replaced by Mr. Hyde.
You could eat the eggs; you’d need to understand that these would be fertilised eggs; if they had been incubated by the bird for any length of time, they might contain a discernible chick embryo, but if you’re raiding them from the nest pretty much as soon as they are laid then the only issue with them being fertilised is one of ickiness (which is absurd, considering you’re eating something that came out of a bird’s arse anyway).
I have never yet eaten pigeon’s eggs, but if you served them fried or boiled, your guests would probably be able to tell they were not from a hen on the pure basis of their size. If you put them into an omelette or something, I reckon you’d probably get away with it.
Eggs from ordinary chickens seem to have ‘whites’ that are rather off-white, in comparison to many others; I have eaten the eggs of duck, goose, guinea fowl, quail and turkey and all of these had a white that was very pure and bright in colour - I wouldn’t be surprised to find the same true of pigeon eggs.
The flavour is quite likely to be within the normal range of egginess.
Never was a GQ answered by a more authorititatively named respondent. All that’s separating our two positions is my OP estimate of a million zillion years. I tried not even to touch the filthy lilttle things (I used a garden trowel to remove the lousy eggs) but I dropped one and I had something that looked quite like a sunny-side-up egg in the frying pan sitting on my terrace.
I’m sorry I didn’t take pictures of the brood that hatched on my terrace two springs ago. Hadn’t realized that was a chance for me to fight a little ignorance here, but they were loud, horribly ugly little buggers who made ceaseless noise and whose parents turned my idyllic terrace, probably the single nicest feature of my apartment, into DroppingsFest 2004.
That’s about the most nonsensical question I’ve heard all week. What does training a pigeon to be a homing pigeon have to do with your destroying their eggs and some random person you saw on the “El” who may or may not be raising them?
I have a kit who hang out on my property on a daily basis. If I’m elsewhere in the neighborhood I can call them with my own distinctive whistle, and they recognize it and fly to my yard. So yeah, that’s more or less homing. Pigeons are legendary for being able to be taken to a place one hundred miles away and finding their way home. No training necessary.
Nonsense, drivel, and loopiness are my specialties, I guess. I got an answer to something I had no idea about (whether pigeons are specially bred for homing, or just trained), I wasn’t really asking about destroying their eggs, having let a nest stand two years ago and regretting it all summer long, but rather about eating the eggs. The answer there could have ranged for all I knew from cautioning me against fatal diseases I would risk to tasty recipes for pigeon-egg quiche, and I’m not sure what problem you have with my idly wondering about the person who attracted hundreds of pigeons to his roof while I was trying to drive mine away, since that gets back to the nature/nurture question.
Mangetout, I wonder about the healthfulness of eating the pigeons. I know squab is a delicacy, but I wonder how much crap, poison, etc. these things ingest, and if there’s a way to see if it’s safe to eat things like city scavengers, or if you just have to run a certain risk. Someone has probably tried living on them, and broiled rat, and sauteed alley-cat, but that’s more up your alley, I guess.
I dunno; animals tend to accumulate pollutants in their bodies when they either:
have long lives
are fairly high up in the food chain
are filter feeders
or any combination of these.
Feral pigeons probably only live a couple of years, and much of what they eat is the remnants of what we’ve just finished eating. Particulate pollutants from vehicles might accumulate to considerable degree in their lungs, but I’m not proposing to eat that part.
There was a news story a while back about a guy in London who was picked up by the police for collecting large numbers of feral pigeons in a sack, apparently intending to cook and serve them in his restaurant. IIRC, the police had to release him without charge because feral pigeons are officially classified as noxious vermin or some such; all they could do was ask him to be discreet about it, so as not to cause an upset with the general public.
I have a friend who owns a few hundred pigeons. They are white homers and they are used for funerals/weddings/etc for white dove releases. http://www.memorymakers.net/
This problem is starting to remind me of a story by Edmund Wilson called “The Man Who Shot Snapping Turtles.” The title character turned a pondful of pestential snapping turtles into a profitable turtle-soup company.
