Animal · Spain, Portugal, Italy
Rock dove
Columba livia — the name this animal has in the language scientists everywhere share.
The rock dove is the grey bird every city knows as a pigeon, and every pigeon in the world, tame or wild, comes from this one species. In the wild it nests on sea cliffs.
Picture credit: Birds of Gilgit-Baltistan (CC BY-SA 2.0) · Flocci Nivis (CC BY 4.0) · Wikimedia Commons
Where does the rock dove live?
Home: Rocky cliffs, farmland and busy city squares.
In the wild it lives in these countries: Spain, Portugal, Italy, Greece, Türkiye, Morocco, Algeria, India.
Conservation status from the IUCN: not in danger.
The short profile
Fully grown: 30-35 cm long, wingspan 62-68 cm. It weighs about 0.3 kilograms. On the menu: both plants and meat.
The story behind it
Long before there were cities, rock doves nested on ledges in cliffs and caves along the coast. A house wall with a window sill is close enough to a cliff for them, which is why they settled in towns so easily. People kept and bred them for thousands of years, for meat, for racing and for carrying messages, and the birds we see in squares are mostly the descendants of escaped ones. Both parents feed their chicks with crop milk, a thick food made in their throat, so a pigeon pair can raise young almost all year round. Pigeons find their way home over hundreds of kilometres using the sun, landmarks and the earth's magnetic field, and a good racing bird can fly around 800 kilometres in a single day.
Find it on the globe
Rock dove is there as a tiny animated figure that breathes and looks around. From far away the planet is only a blue ball; detail arrives as you zoom in, and this one appears once you are close enough. Open it on the globe.
It sits at its real coordinates, not near them — the same numbers listed in the facts above. Switch off the layer for this kind of place and it disappears again; the buttons for that are down the right-hand edge.
Questions children ask
Why are there so many pigeons in cities?
Because a city looks like their natural home. Walls, bridges and window ledges replace the sea cliffs they nest on, food is easy to find, and pairs can raise chicks nearly all year round.
Do pigeons really find their way home?
Yes. Released hundreds of kilometres away, a homing pigeon steers by the sun, by landmarks it remembers and by the earth's magnetic field, and good racing birds cover about 800 kilometres in a day.
What do pigeons feed their chicks?
With crop milk. Both the mother and the father make a thick, pale food in their crop, a pouch in the throat, and the chick pushes its beak inside to drink it.
Where these numbers come from
Every figure on this page was checked against public reference sources before publication. Where sources genuinely disagree, the text says so.
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