Niall Hatch
speaker
1,514 appearances
30 recordings
3 series
first heard Apr 2026
last heard 4d ago
Niall Hatch’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 30 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 10.
Appearances
Niall, what's going on?
matched
It does look really bizarre, and you can see from this pigeon, the way it's strutting around, that it isn't terribly comfortable the way it's walking either.
This is one of these mutations that has been developed in captivity.
People breed strains of these pigeons.
All of these domestic pigeons, the same species as the feral pigeons you see on the streets, they're all descended from a wild bird called the rock dove, which you still find in parts of the west of Ireland and on some offshore islands in remote areas on sea cliffs.
It's a very shy bird, strangely, for a bird that's descendants have become so tame around humans.
And over many hundreds or even thousands of years, these were selectively bred by humans and a whole lot of different breeds were created and still are being created in exactly the same way as all the breeds of dog alive today have descended from the wolf.
Even though many of them look nothing like a wild wolf, some are much smaller, completely different colours, floppy ears, all these things.
So these mutations were selected for by breeders.
So some of them wanted pigeons that weren't the normal sort of grey and black colour you get in the wild.
They wanted some that had maybe reddish colour in them or pure white.
Some people wanted to breed ones that had sort of fanned out tails, almost like a miniature peacock that looked more elaborate like that.
Some bred for long, long necks just to show these birds a sort of a quirk.
There were also breeds that were bred for their meat and for their eggs.
So some with sort of larger breasts than others, so there'd be more meat on them.
They would lay larger eggs perhaps.
And so they had those.
And some were bred particularly for racing and for homing and carrying messages where they were selected for this homing instinct and this migratory ability.
And this is one of those types of pigeons.
It's one of these sort of featherfoot pigeons.
Showing 321–340 of 1,514 · page 17 of 76
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