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| 8 x 10 Acrylic Painting by Mark Phillips |
Today I sold the first 3 paintings in my birds of Barbados Collection. They were bought by one collector. This led me searching for some other paintings that I had done so that I could fill the empty spaces on my studio walls. I found this little beauty.
Pigeons and doves constitute the animal family Columbidae and the order Columbiformes, which includes about 42 genera and 310 species. This family occurs worldwide. Pigeons and doves are likely the most common birds in the world.
My grandfather kept pigeons. The pigeon coop was located right next to the chicken coop in the backyard. Every morning he would let them out to fly far and wide and every afternoon they would return to be fed and locked away for the night. I have no idea why he kept them. I don’t think that he ate them. I can’t remember ever eating one. Just another thing to add to the list of things that I did not ask him when he was alive.
Pigeons are very interesting birds. Here are a few little-known facts.
1. THEY MIGHT BE THE FIRST DOMESTICATED BIRD.
The common city pigeon (Columba livia), also known as the rock pigeon, might be the first bird humankind ever domesticated. You can see them in art dating back as far as 4500 BCE in modern Iraq, and they've been a valuable source of food for thousands of years.
2. THEY UNDERSTAND SPACE AND TIME.
In a 2017 Current Biology study, researchers showed captive pigeons a series of digital lines on a computer screen for either two or eight seconds. Some lines were short, measuring about 2.3 inches across; others were four times longer. The pigeons were trained to evaluate either the length of the line or how long it was displayed. They found that the more time a line was displayed, the longer in length the pigeon judged it to be. The reverse was true too: If the pigeons encountered a longer line, they thought it existed in time for a greater duration. Pigeons, the scientists concluded, understand the concepts of both time and space; the researchers noted: "similar results have been found with humans and other primates."
3. THEY CAN FIND THEIR WAY BACK TO THE NEST FROM 1300 MILES AWAY.
The birds can do this even if they've been transported in isolation—with no visual, olfactory, or magnetic clues—while scientists rotate their cages so they don't know what direction they're travelling in. How they do this is a mystery, but people have been exploiting the pigeon's navigational skills since at least 3000 BCE when ancient peoples would set caged pigeons free and follow them to nearby land. Their navigational skills also make pigeons great long-distance messengers. Sports fans in ancient Greece are said to have used trained pigeons to carry the results of the Ancient Olympics. Further east, Genghis Khan stayed in touch with his allies and enemies alike through a pigeon-based postal network.
4. THEY SAVED THOUSANDS OF HUMAN LIVES DURING WORLD WARS I AND II.
Pigeons' homing talents continued to shape history during the 20th century. In both World Wars, rival nations had huge flocks of pigeon messengers. (America alone had 200,000 at its disposal in WWII.) By delivering critical updates, the birds saved thousands of human lives. One racing bird named Cher Ami completed a mission that led to the rescue of 194 stranded U.S. soldiers on October 4, 1918.
And, my favourite…
5. YOU CAN TRAIN THEM TO BE ART SNOBS …
Japanese psychologist Shigeru Watanabe and two colleagues earned an Ig Nobel Prize in 1995 for training pigeons, in a lab setting, to recognize the paintings of Claude Monet and Pablo Picasso and to distinguish between the painters. The pigeons were even able to use their knowledge of impressionism and cubism to identify paintings of other artists in those movements. Later, Watanabe taught other pigeons to distinguish watercolour images from pastels. And in a 2009 experiment, captive pigeons he'd borrowed were shown almost two dozen paintings made by students at a Tokyo elementary school, and were taught which ones were considered "good" and which ones were considered "bad." He then presented them with 10 new paintings and the avian critics managed to correctly guess which ones had earned bad grades from the school's teacher and a panel of adults. Watanabe's findings indicate that wild pigeons naturally categorize things on the basis of colour, texture, and general appearance.
6. … AND TO DISTINGUISH WRITTEN WORDS.
In a 2016 study, scientists showed that pigeons can differentiate between strings of letters and actual words. Four of the birds built up a vocabulary of between 26 and 58 written English words, and though the birds couldn't actually read them, they could identify visual patterns and therefore tell them apart. The birds could even identify words they hadn't seen before.
7. ONE STUDY SUGGESTS THAT, GIVEN THE RIGHT CONDITIONS, THEY'RE AS GOOD AT IDENTIFYING CANCER AS DOCTORS.
We've already established that pigeons are excellent at differentiating between artists and words, but a 2015 study revealed they can also distinguish between malignant and benign growths in the right conditions. Researchers at University of California Davis Medical Center put 16 pigeons in a room with magnified biopsies of potential breast cancers. If the pigeons correctly identified them as either benign or malignant, they got a treat, According to Scientific American.
"Once trained, the pigeons' average diagnostic accuracy reached an impressive 85 percent. But when a "flock sourcing" approach was taken, in which the most common answer among all subjects was used, group accuracy climbed to a staggering 99 percent, or what would be expected from a pathologist. The pigeons were also able to apply their knowledge to novel images, showing the findings weren't simply a result of rote memorization."
Mark Phillips
Artist
Email:- mark@phillipsbajanart.com
Website:-www.phillipsbajanart.com
Online Store:- PhillipsArtStore
Email:- mark@phillipsbajanart.com
Website:-www.phillipsbajanart.com
Online Store:- PhillipsArtStore
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