Paintings and statues of him show birds and butterflies resting in his arms.
Two of the show birds were missing by Tuesday morning and that evening a member of the public removed the rest and re-homed them.
She described an incident where a keeper of show pigeons had 50 of his birds, including two rare birds imported from Germany, shot by airguns over the past five years.
BBC: NEWS | UK | Scotland | Animal gun attacks 'more severe'
The researchers suspect that dark coloured birds evolved this silver sheen as a way to show off, while maintaining the benefits of dark coloured feathers.
Earlier figures show there were 1, 000 of the birds living in the wild in 1980.
Only laboratory tests can show whether they are a threat to other birds, or to those who keep them.
Researchers believe its short arms and large claw show how bird-like dinosaurs evolved independently of birds.
"The specimens from China that show wings are dinosaurs that are more closely related to birds, " explained Darla Zelenitsky of the University of Calgary in Canada, lead author on the research.
But when the birds were four or five days old, the less feathered started to show their deficiencies.
ECONOMIST: Birds that don't fly may be using their wings to run uphill
And, the researchers show unambiguously how escaped racing pigeons have bolstered the populations of feral birds.
Meanwhile, toy giant Mattel was showing off its Angry Birds Knock On Wood game, which I first spotted last month at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.
The latest figures from the WHO show that 573 people have been infected since 2003, after close contact with diseased birds. 336 of them died, which gives it a mortality rate of more than 50%.
Their results, published in Environmental Pollution, show that as radiation levels in an area rose to 35 microsieverts per hour, the average number of birds dropped by almost a third compared with the areas where radiation levels were only 0.5 microsieverts per hour.
应用推荐