Photography Patrol – “Pigeon Patrol — Nikon D 100 Photo by Samuel E. Warren Jr.

“Pigeon Patrol”

Nephew Glen Roa, tossed out the bird seed, this morning. Suddenly, the sky above One Warren Way is alive with the flutter of pigeon wings. The nephews “pet” pigeons precision decent to their in-the-field mess hall and gather for breakfast chow, while ignoring the “Foreign Object Debris” of the piece of a brown plastic sack in the left corner of the photo.

It is reported that the last official “military carrier pigeon” died at the end of World War II. Thus, these pet pigeons have come to expect the “welfare” contributions of the boys each morning before school.

I grew up on a hog farm in Missouri and pets were dogs,puppies,cats, kittens,runt pigs, and the occasional baby calf on a bottle. Cardinals and blue jays flew overhead, but, they waited until people were a safe distance away before doing “touch and go” landings in the yard for feed seed.

In the US Air Force, man’s metal birds and nature’s birds had problems sharing the sky overhead. Each year, birds jeopardized “man and machine” through “bird strikes”, when either a bird or a flock of birds would get sucked into a large aircraft engine damaging the rotor blades and threatening the overall safety of the flight.

There were also “bird strike” incidents were a bird would slam through the canopy of a fighter aircraft, smashing the canopy, injuring and sometimes killing the fighter pilot. Thus, global air force bases and large international civilian airports always used a variety of ways to try and “scare” birds away from the active runways and maintain a safe “No Fly Zone” for nature’s birds. Therefore, when it comes to pigeons, I leave the morning and afternoon pigeon patrol sortie schedules to the boys and their pet pigeons. Nikon D 100 Photo by Samuel E. Warren Jr.