- any species of pigeon. This is one bird that every city-dweller knows:
For a Clydebank waif whose contact with the natural world among the sandstone canyons in the 1950s was restricted to scabby doos, scruffy cats, three-legged dugs...
(Herald 16 October 1999)
Like working men in many other parts of the British Isles, Scots, particularly in mining communities, enjoyed racing pigeons. These were treated like royalty. Davie Kerr demonstrates the high priority they had in men's lives in A Puckle Poems (2000):
Drookit miners at lowsin, whan hame fae the mine,
Suin stripp't aff thir pee-wee's [singlets], ti a scrub in the bine [wash tub]
Syne gaed doun ti thir doo-cots, ti let oot the doos,...
For more information on pee-wees, see Peesweep.
The interesting derivative doo's cleckin comes from the pigeon's regular egg-laying regime:
When domesticated they [rock doves] have four broods in the year, always two at a time - male and female. Hence a boy and girl [i.e. twins] are called 'a doo's cleckin’'
(GEORGE BRUCE The Land Birds in and around St Andrews 1895)