The Noble New Zealand Pigeon
It's the small things that matter most in foreign travel. The things that are almost familiar, but not quite.

Roaming through the big museum in Auckland, NZ, I came across a nice exhibit festooned with sepia-toned prints and dedicated to the New Zealand Pigeon, the world's largest pigeon. It was the first time I had ever seen the adjective "noble" applied to a pigeon, but, after all, it was no ordinary pigeon, but the world's largest!

A week later, I was walking with several people on a path in Paparoa National Park when, lo and behold, there was the noble New Zealand Pigeon in its natural habitat! It looked miserable. It might be in its homeland but it didn't look at home.

This Westland rain forest looked kind-of scruffy, like a second-growth rather than an old-growth forest, with a very dense understory absolutely jam-packed with twigs and trunks and ferns and who-knows what else. There was simply no room here for a large bird at all. The pigeon panicked at our approach, and began battering itself against the unforgiving vegetation. We tiptoed past to save it from injury.

So, I picture the imprisoned New Zealand Pigeon patiently waiting out the decades until the trees grow taller, kill off some of the undergrowth, and restore a measure of nobility to its crowded life.
(Perv With A Dog had his eyes pecked out by scrub jays on, Thu 18 Apr 2013, 20:13, 1 reply)

While they are indeed pleasant birds,
the largest surviving pigeon: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victoria_Crowned_Pigeon
The Dodo and Reunion Solitaire being the previous holders before they became extinct.
It's still the largest pigeon in NZ though. And not just because it's the only native one. Well, it kind of is.
( Colonel Boris "...a desperate Buzzfeed imitation...", Thu 18 Apr 2013, 22:40, closed)