Wood Pigeons and Tunnicliffe’s Brooke Bond Bird Portraits
There’s a Wood Pigeon in my local country park. They seem such heavy birds:
Back home I look Wood Pigeon up in the Brooke Bond album of tea cards called ‘Bird Portraits’ with illustrations by Charles Tunnicliffe.
Many things have changed since the original tea cards were given away over 60 years ago in packs of Brooke Bond Tea: paper and printing technology have changed massively, our knowledge of the science of birds has expanded as had our understanding of how man-made climate change is impacting on them.
One thing has remained unchanged, however, and that is that Charles Tunnicliffe’s illustrations are still the greatest.
Forty years ago I saw Wood Pigeons and wrote about them in my childhood nature notebooks:
Here are some of my previous Wood Pigeon portraits. I’m fascinated by their egg-shaped irises: