I wonder whether it is the doves' lining up on wires or their attraction
to them in the first place that sparks (sorry) the dispute in Mr.
Gilbert's family.  I have nothing to offer about the whole shoulder to
shoulder shtick beyond some vague hand-waving about solidarity among
birds suffering from a moderate to severe respect deficit, but I can say
that electrical wires wouldn't make particularly satisfactory foot
warmers.

The amount of power dissipated (convertible to heat) over a length of
wire is equal to the square of the voltage drop divided by the
resistance of that portion of the wire.  Although a very small value for
the resistance of the wire, placed in the denominator, appears to
promise a nice fat value for P, the warming hypothesis runs into trouble
in the numerator: the voltage drop is smaller than the most fastidious
person's notion of negligible.  (Which is good. Were it not so,
transporting electrical energy by means of wires would be as inefficient
as carrying water in a sieve.)  It's not the nominal voltage of the
line, perhaps 2400 V for a garden-variety line along a birdy secondary
road, that counts; it's the voltage decrease from one side of the bird's
foot to the other.  Not only is that value a little less than zero point
nothing, it must be squared, leaving us with even less nothing.  And we
haven't yet considered how much heat the wire might conduct away from
the bird's body on a cold day.

I don't think we need worry about the outbreak of a heated dispute over
the warm toes hypothesis. (Sorry, I did it again.)

My immediate, and almost certainly wrong, thought was that electrical
wires are an abundant, if minimalist, approximation of doves' ancestral
habitat.  Wires are a little like cliffs in a way, and pigeons do thrive
on using human structures.  This idea is not helpful for wire sitters
such as swallows, though, which I suppose allies me with the
no-better-alternative branch of the Gilbert clan.

Larry Hills
Richmond