The common city pigeon, or Rock Dove (Columba livia), is a highly adaptable bird often seen navigating urban environments. To answer the direct question, pigeons do not specifically hunt spiders, but they will consume them rarely and only opportunistically. Their primary diet is built around plant matter, making any spider consumption an incidental event driven by temporary necessity rather than a preferred food source. This flexibility in diet has enabled them to thrive alongside humans across the globe.
What Pigeons Typically Eat
Pigeons are primarily classified as granivores, meaning their diet mainly consists of seeds and grains. In natural settings, they forage for a wide variety of seeds from grasses, weeds, and cultivated crops, which provide necessary carbohydrates for energy. Their digestive system, specifically a muscular gizzard, is well-adapted to grind these hard seeds and grains for nutrient absorption. In urban areas, the feral pigeon’s diet has broadened significantly to include human food scraps. City pigeons frequently scavenge for bread and other remnants, but they still prefer and seek out seeds and grains when available.
The Role of Invertebrates in Pigeon Nutrition
While not true insectivores, feral pigeons consume small invertebrates, including spiders, worms, and insects, as a protein supplement. This consumption is usually opportunistic, meaning they eat the small creatures they encounter while foraging. These items form only a small part of their overall food intake.
The need for higher protein is most pronounced during specific life stages, such as breeding and moulting. During the breeding season, parents require more protein to produce “crop milk,” a rich, fat and protein-dense substance they feed to their squabs. Eating invertebrates helps meet this elevated protein requirement when high-quality seeds or legumes are scarce.
Where Pigeons Search for Food
Pigeons are fundamentally ground feeders, which strongly influences what they encounter and eat. They spend their foraging time walking or running, pecking food directly from the ground surface, such as fields, parks, and city pavements. This behavior makes them highly likely to find fallen seeds and grains, along with any small, slow-moving invertebrates.
This ground-level foraging behavior is the main reason why spiders are not a common part of their diet. Most spiders build webs in elevated locations or under leaves, habitats that do not frequently intersect with a pigeon’s search area. Therefore, any spider consumption is typically limited to species found crawling on the ground or those accidentally ingested with seeds.