No, I am the guy that just a few weeks ago got told that he can’t open the window of the joint staircases anymore to let out the stale summer heat, because then the pigeons would fly in.
I am the guy that can’t use the easternmost quarter of his balcony any more because it is constantly covered under shit from the pigeon-meeting-place above.
I am the guy whose car is covered in off-colour smudges because the pidgeon-piss from the tree above has corroded the paint.

I am pretty sure that most of the people here that like pidgeons would think completely different when they had to live with them in close quarters and have their quality of live noticeably reduced.

Other birds are great, though! We have sparrows, tits, blackbirds, dozens of other types. All great!
Occasionally a pair of crows is visiting. Those are impressive birds! Intelligent as fuck, don’t give a shit but stay out of your way if you don’t want to interact. And, double Bingo: the pigeons don’t like them!

So the more a shame that most times we leave them to their grim fate in the urban hell we brought them to with us!

Given the fact that they mainly were a food source instead of noble mail carriers, perhaps having been abandoned in reality has not been that bad a fate…

🤪

Well, more metaphorically and limited to densely populated areas. I mean, rural pigeons are great!
But their city dwelling cousins are mostly poor beasts, malnutritioned, disease plaqued, often invalid: half blind, missing leg, barely enough feathers to fly even short distances.
On top of that a public health issue. So the rat comparison mostly holds, I am afraid…

And if we are talking about other birds than pigeons - totally different topic!

Sure… a typical setup strictly for growing “lettuce”. Nothing else to see here…!

Happy about airborne rats?
Seriously?

Apparently these are not the seeds themselves but only the remains of the original ovulums that contained the seed when they still existed.

Hey, I already hate peanut butter, you don’t have to convince me any more! ;-)

If we allow for scientific names, the winner would probably be “Aa”, the name of a type of plant.
But I personally would not count them, as not part of everyday language.
I asked an AI if it could come up with other suggestions. It burned up 5000 tokens while thinking and successfully found “Alabama”.
So I think banana lost its first place in any case…

“Strange times for the berry club…”
I love that comic strip! :-)

But is “Ara” an English word? My favorite translation page tells me that the English name of the bird is “macaw”. Still a nice A-ratio, although lower than for banana! :-)

Ok, I stand corrected, TIL about parthenocarpy:

In botany and horticulture, parthenocarpy is the natural or artificially induced production of fruit without fertilisation of ovules, which makes the fruit seedless

And the word “banana” might be a very promising candidate for the word with the highest “letter a”-to-consonant-ratio in the English language. Unless there are some double-a words out there…

I thought the tiny black dots inside were supposed to be the seeds?

Also: Strawberries are nuts - and Peanuts aren’t.

They are not that common here in Germany in general, but my city has in the past years put up a dozen or so, mainly in public parks.
They are maintained by our municipal utility service and are basically always in perfect condition.
At least during summer. Being outdoor installations they are shut down (actually completely removed) during the winter months.

Other than that I only had one in elementary school 30 years ago, which also worked and a lot of actual natural springs with drinking outlets that are often maintained by rural communities.

Our city also has one of those natural water drinking fountains, but as it is the (still maintained and monitored) remains of a thermal baths project from a hundred years ago, it is not so suitable for actually quenching your thirst. Full of crazy salts and minerals with a faintly sulfuric aroma on top - but supposed to be healthy :-)

So, in general: no complaints where I live.

I don’t remember Pokémon Red/Blue and am a parent… So this means I am considered young? 😀

Guys, that is a reeaaaallly slippery slope. Don’t. Just don’t.

-A concerned German-

I’m using openrouter.ai which is a service that allows the use of a wide range of models and you can easily switch between them on the fly.

Besides the major players I can also use cloud hosted instances of open models. These are often incredibly cheap and and you can select the ones that don’t use your data for training.

Typical use cases include language learning and copilot stuff for programming.