[EBB Sightings] thanks re White King (bred) pigeon at Tilden

Thank you, Hilary. I think that explains perfectly what we saw at Tilden.
I'll have to walk down to the Lake Merritt cage -- I work quite near there.

I did not realize that some breeds of what (we birders call) Rock 
Doves are so large, but looking online I see there are many sizes and 
shapes created by breeders (who seem to always call them pigeons). I 
saw a description of a White King on a pigeon page on the Internet: 
"a very large utility (for eating) pigeon called a white king. A very 
sleek and normal shaped pigeon.......just huge!"
I guess that's about what I saw -- if you could say my "longbodied" 
was "sleek."

Hilary Powers wrote:
There's also a strain of domestic pigeon we called "White Kings" when 
I was a kid, raising 'em with the boys across the street. They're 
huge compared to the regular rock pigeon - maybe 30% bigger or so. 
You can see some samples in the globe cage at Lake Merritt.
David Couch wrote:
We saw a very large, totally white pigeon flying [...] It really 
seemed to have the distinctly long bodied shape of a band-tailed 
pigeon and also seemed at least as large as the several band-tailed 
pigeons we saw we saw near the area ... [and] we saw no Rock Doves... 
[But] was I really just seeing a beautifully-bred white Rock Dove?

David Herzstein Couch
Berkeley