Peter and Patricia Pigeon set up house together

Keith S. Taber

In my work I've spent a lot of time analysing the things learners say about science topics in order to characterise their thinking. Although this work is meant to have an ethnographic feel, and to be ideographic (valuing the thinking of the individual in its own terms), there is always an underlying normative aspect: that is, inevitably there is a question of how well learners' conceptualisations match target curricular knowledge and canonical science. We all have intuitions which are at odd with scientific accounts of the world, and we all develop alternative conceptions – notions which are inconsistent with canonical concepts.

It is easier to spot this in others (you think what?!) than it is in ourselves. But occasionally you may reflect on the way you think about a topic and recognise aberrations in your own thinking. One of these examples in my own thinking relates to bird's nests. I know that birds build nests as a place to lay and hatch eggs. Using the ground would be very dangerous due to vulnerability to predators. Simply using branches would be precarious – especially as eggs are hardly best shaped to be balanced on a tree branch. I also know that once the young are fledged have fled the nest, it has outlived its purposes.

Yet it was only a few years ago – I think when came across discarded nests in the garden – that I released I have carried around with me since quite young the metaphor that a nest is a bird's home – it is where the bird family lives. Perhaps I made up that idea as a child. More likely I was told that or heard it on a children's programme. If so, perhaps it was not meant to be taken too literally – it was just meant to compare the nest with something that would be familiar to a child. But I think well into adulthood I had this notion of that birds lived in trees – not explicitly, but insidiously in the back of my mind: as if a bird had a home in a tree and that was where it was based – unless and until perhaps it could afford to move upmarket to a better tree!

Although I was well aware (at one level) that birds do not have permanent family homes to which they return at the end of a hard day's exertions, I also had this nest=home identity at the 'back of my mind' giving the impression that this is how birds live. As humans we take for granted certain kinds of forms of life (perhaps home, work, family, etc.), and these act as default templates for understanding the world. This makes anthropomorphising nature seem quite a natural thing to do.

Watching this process develop was quite entertaining. Peter would spend ages pecking at pieces of plant that were firmly fixed in the ground, ignoring nearby loose material. His early attempts to take material back to the nest were troubled. He would take material that was too large to get through the foliage into the secluded nesting area. He would also fly close to 'home' and then abort as found he could not land with his goods. However, he soon seemed to learn what worked, and developed a technique of first flying onto the fence or the roof the ivy was growing on to, so he would not be flying up to the nesting place from the ground in a single stage.

The sequences below show the pigeon flying out from, and back to, the nest.

The jumping/diving action is clear in the sequence below:

The fourth and fifth frames in the sequence below show the 'landing gear' coming into position (reminiscent of a bird of prey taking its prey):

The landing action is also clear near the end of the sequence below:

Another take off. catching the first few flaps:

My favourite sequence – quite extended for my hand-held camera work! – in the 11th frame our pigeon is just entering frame right. But notice a sparrow sitting on top of the foliage to the left. The sparrow has presumably seen/heard the much larger bird comings it way, and in the next frame can be seen to be moving its wings ready to take off. The next three frames have the sparrow heading right as the pigeon moves to the left (the sparrow is a smudge beneath the pigeon's left wing in the third of these frames), and the sparrow appears to have disappeared from view in the next, but must have been obscured by the pigeon as it seen to the right of the next frame. The sequence ends with the pigeon in landing mode.