The English countryside is no more. Back to The Scorpion's Tale Page 2 Pigeons The city pigeon, or Flying Rat, builds its nests in the lighting above strip-clubs and massage parlours. Its bodily secretions are powerful enough to short out up to twenty metres of neon tubing in one sitting.
Pigeons are the billy goats of the sky, eating over seventy times their own weight each day.
Sardine tins, syringes, used prophylactics, pizza cardboard, they all spell dinner to Stumpy, the peckish smoke-owl. For this reason, city birds do not make good eating, and when dead should be poked down a drain with a stick rather than served on a pesto mash with raspberry coulis. Pigeons are only spotted on pavements when they are very ill, or when they have had their feet burned off by pungent chemicals left on the ledges of government buildings. At airports you can watch entire flocks getting sucked into the jet engines of 747s. They have been known to fly onto the face of a homegoing clubber from a distance of forty metres, and can eat an entire pensioner in under two hours.