Spatio-temporal use of the urban habitat by feral pigeons (Columba livia )

Feral pigeons are descendants of wild rock pigeons that have adapted to the urban habitat. They have partially conserved the foraging behaviour of their wild ancestors (flights to agricultural areas) but have also developed new habits. Previous studies on the foraging strategies of feral pigeons have given various results, e.g. maximum distances reached by the pigeons (measured in a straight line from the resting places) differed between 0.3-0.5km and 18-25km. This study focuses on the spatio-temporal activity of feral pigeons in the urban habitat. We equipped 80 free-living feral pigeons from Basel, Switzerland with GPS receivers. We found three different foraging strategies for pigeons in Basel: (1) in the streets, squares and parks near the home loft, (2) in agricultural areas surrounding the city, (3) on docks and railway lines in harbours. The maximum distance reached by a pigeon was 5.29km. More than 32% of the pigeons remained within 0.3km of the home lofts and only 7.5% flew distances of more than 2km. Females covered significantly longer distances than males, preferring to fly to more abundant and predictable food sources. Temporal activity patterns showed to be influenced by sex, breeding state and season. In contrast to wild rock pigeons and to feral pigeons in other cities, pigeons in Basel showed a clear bimodal activity pattern for breeding birds only. The differences between our results and those of other studies seem to be partly method-dependent, as the GPS-technique allows to record the pigeons' localisations continuously in contrast to other methods. Other differences might be due to different kinds of food supply in the various cities. Our study shows that feral pigeons have individual foraging strategies and are flexible enough to adapt to different urban environment