Woodpigeon

A big, plump pigeon, 40 to 42 cm long and around 480 to 550 g, and the largest pigeon in the UK. It is grey above with a pinkish breast, and an adult has a white patch on each side of the neck. In flight, look for the broad white band across each wing.¹

Close up, the white neck patch sits beside a sheen of green and purple, the breast is mauve-pink fading to cream on the belly, and the grey tail ends in a broad black band. The eye is pale, the bill pinkish at the base and yellow towards the tip with a white patch (the cere) above the nostrils, and the legs are reddish-purple.²

Adult Woodpigeons weighed by BTO ringers average 507 g.³ When one flies off, listen for the loud clatter of its wings.

Males and females look alike. In females the white neck patches tend to be a little smaller and the breast less pink, but the difference is slight. Males are a little heavier on average, 529 g against 488 g for females in BTO's samples, though the ranges overlap.³ See male and female Woodpigeons for what can and cannot tell them apart.

Young birds lack the white neck patch and the green sheen. They are duller and paler than adults, with fawn or rusty edges to the feathers and a rusty-fawn breast.

Pigeons and doves are one family, and the names mark no real difference.⁴ Of the pigeons you are likely to see in the UK, the Woodpigeon is the biggest, and the only wild one with a white patch on each side of the neck.

The Stock Dove is smaller and has no white on the neck, only a metallic neck patch. A Rock Dove is smaller and light grey, with bold black wing bars and a metallic neck patch; town pigeons are the same species but come in many colours. The Collared Dove is smaller and beige-grey, with a black collar edged with white.

The song is the familiar cooing of gardens and woods: a phrase of four or five deep coos, the second usually stressed, repeated with hardly a pause so that it can sound continuous, and usually ending with a single short note. Woodpigeons also give a gruffer double coo at longer intervals. Listen to British recordings and see the coo drawn as a spectrogram in Woodpigeon call and song.

Not every sound is vocal. In the display flight a bird climbs, sometimes claps its wings, then glides down on stiff wings. In central London in the 1950s, song was heard from December to September and most of all from March to June.⁵

Almost anywhere, all year. Woodpigeons are found in virtually every 10-km square of Britain and Ireland except the higher Scottish mountains and some islands with little woodland, and they are most numerous in the arable east. They are commonest in broadleaved woodland, and common on farmland, in scrub, villages and towns.

Shy in the countryside, they can be tame in towns, parks and gardens, where many feed on lawns.

Watch for big grey pigeons feeding on lawns and fields, listen for the deep cooing phrase from a treetop, and look for the white wing bands as a flock lifts off.

British and Irish Woodpigeons mostly stay put. Ringing shows that a few reach France, and a handful of birds ringed on the Continent turn up here.⁶ In winter, numbers in the UK are boosted by birds from the Continent.¹

Every autumn there is a mystery. From late October through November, flocks of thousands, sometimes tens of thousands, fly high and south on clear days, especially over south-west England and south Wales. Where they are going is not known for sure: they may be birds from further north heading for milder parts of Britain, or birds from as far as Scandinavia heading for France and Spain. Across northern and eastern Europe most Woodpigeons do migrate, and millions winter in Spain and Portugal.

In trees. Outside the breeding season Woodpigeons gather in flocks that feed together by day and roost together in woods at night, often flying some distance between the two. In central London in the 1950s, Stanley Cramp found territory-holding males flying in each morning from a communal roost on the island in the Regent's Park lake.⁵

Almost entirely plants: green leaves such as clover and oilseed rape, grain, buds, seeds, and the fruits and seeds of trees, such as ivy berries, acorns and beech-mast. A few snails, slugs and other small animals are taken too. See what Woodpigeons eat for the year's menu and feeding them in your garden.

Woodpigeons nest late. A pair's first clutch is laid, on average, around the end of April, and nesting peaks in the summer.³ The nest is a platform of twigs in a tree, and the clutch is usually 2 white eggs, incubated by both parents for about 17 days. Like all pigeons, the parents feed their chicks on "crop milk" at first.

See Woodpigeon nesting for the nest, eggs, young and the late season, and do Woodpigeons mate for life? for courtship and pairs.

In winter Woodpigeons live in flocks, which on farmland can number many thousands; each bird keeps a little space around itself as it feeds. From winter into spring, pairs settle on territories. A male proclaims his with song and the display flight, and courts a female with a low bow, neck puffed out to show the white patches and tail fanned.

Fights can be fierce: rivals strike each other with heavy blows of the wings.

A Woodpigeon that survives to breed typically lives about 3 years; around six in ten adults survive from one year to the next.³

Some live far longer. The oldest on the BTO's ringing list is a female ringed as an adult at Gamlingay, Cambridgeshire, in July 2004 and found there in March 2024, 19 years 8 months 16 days later, so she was older still.⁷ A bird ringed at Sandwich Bay, Kent, in 2005 was caught there again in 2023, 17 years 10 months on.⁶ The European longevity list of 2023 had an Orkney bird at 17 years 8 months as its oldest Woodpigeon.⁸

Most nest losses are eggs taken by predators. In Murton's 1966 study, crows and their relatives took most of the eggs that were lost, mainly from nests left unguarded.⁹ In London parks, Cramp saw Carrion Crows rob many early nests in the bare plane trees, and a 1978 study of London parks found Woodpigeon numbers were lower where there were more crows.¹⁰

Birds of prey take full-grown birds too: one ringed on North Ronaldsay, Orkney, was found 850 km away in Gloucestershire, killed by a bird of prey.

The Woodpigeon is on the UK Amber List and is of Least Concern worldwide. There are about 5.2 million pairs in the UK (2016).³ Numbers rose 152% between 1967 and 2024. There is some evidence that the spread of winter cereals and oilseed rape helped, probably by giving them more food in winter: unlike most seed-eaters, Woodpigeons can live on green leaves.

The rise has levelled off. UK numbers were up 33% between 1995 and 2024, but changed little between 2014 and 2024 (down 2%), and fell 10% between 2024 and 2025.¹¹

Like all wild birds, Woodpigeons and their nests in use are protected by law in Great Britain¹² and Northern Ireland.¹³ In each UK country the licensing body (Natural England, Natural Resources Wales, NatureScot and DAERA) also issues general licences that let authorised people, such as landowners, kill or take certain birds, and take or destroy their nests and eggs, in set circumstances. The Woodpigeon is listed in those for preventing serious damage, mainly to crops, and in some cases the spread of disease: GL42 in England¹⁴, General Licence 001 in Wales¹⁵, GL02 in Scotland¹⁶ and TPG/2 in Northern Ireland¹⁷ (all 2026). In England, users must make reasonable efforts to solve the problem by other lawful means, such as scaring or netting, unless these would be impractical, ineffective or disproportionate; Wales gives the same advice.