Unique call of wood pigeons

He tells me this every day, 50 times a day. But he never moves, because the silly old fool is already home, in the yew tree at the bottom of the garden. He has been there for five years threatening the same move, yet he never moves.

Another ring dove, also known as wood pigeon, has been telling me about his home in the hedge for six years.

He has a much more lively voice, the hoarse yell of a cockney street trader trying to sell carpets: "I've got another carpet yes-yes. I've got another carpet, yes-yes".

Always that double note at the end making him immediately identifiable. Again, he inhabits the same tree he was born into seven years ago. His father also had a double note at the end and he was there for seven years too, until he died or was shot in the surrounding fields.

Every wood pigeon has a unique way of telling the same basic tune of them all. Just listen for a while and you will soon learn who's who.

There are more than five million wood pigeons in Britain covering every part of the land except the more remote parts of the Scottish mountains and West Coast. That is an awful lot of wood pigeons, just as once there were a vast number of passenger pigeons in America.

That bird is now extinct. Two centuries ago its numbers blackened the sky. You just cannot take anything for granted. Here today, gone tomorrow, like most of the starlings and house sparrows. Swifts, swallows, and cuckoos have declined alarmingly over the past ten years.

It would be very sad if the wood pigeon suddenly vanished, for its daft old song, like that of the rook, is part of lazy afternoons in the countryside. Of course it is unlikely.

Wood pigeons have five broods of two young each year, and modern farming with a plentiful supply of grain at the peak breeding time, with wild fruit in autumn, ivy berries in winter, and green crops between including clover and buttercup leaves mean they do not go hungry.

Today, farmers shoot far fewer pigeons than they did 50 years ago due to cautionary aspects of EU legislations. Even in drought conditions the wood pigeons squabs do not go thirsty.

Like this bird in my picture taken at Midhurst pond last week, the parents carry water home to the thirsty young in their throats, making sure the young survive.

Old groaner and the carpet salesman in my garden carry water a mile home from a water trough out on the downland fields.

They need plenty to wet their whistles so they can sing to me every few minutes.