Victoria Crowned Pigeon

🤯 Fun Facts

• A Pigeon the Size of a TurkeyThe Victoria crowned pigeon is the largest pigeon in the world, around 75 centimeters long and up to roughly 2.5 kilograms, which is to say a pigeon you would notice from across a field. It is blue-grey with a maroon breast, a deep red eye, and a fan of crest feathers standing upright on its head. It spends nearly all of its time walking the forest floor of northern New Guinea, and flies up mainly to roost or to get away from something.
• The Crest Is Lace, Not SpikesUp close the crown is not the stiff fan it looks like at a distance. Each feather in it has a bare shaft for most of its length and opens into a small triangular tip of white barbs at the end, so the whole crest reads as an open mesh with a dotted white edge. Two other crowned pigeon species carry their own versions, and the white tips are the quickest way to tell this one apart from them.
• Both Parents Make MilkPigeons feed their chicks on crop milk, a thick protein and fat rich secretion produced by cells lining the crop, and both the male and the female make it. It is not milk in any mammalian sense and contains no lactose, but it does the same job, and a crowned pigeon chick lives on nothing else for its first days. Pairs usually raise a single chick, and both birds sit the egg, the male through the day and the female overnight.