Which bird mistakes Alice for a serpent?

A pigeon mistakes Alice for a serpent in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

The encounter occurs in Chapter 5, “Advice from a Caterpillar,” after Alice experiments with pieces of the Caterpillar’s mushroom. Her neck stretches dramatically upward into the branches of a tree, where a pigeon sees her elongated head and assumes she is a snake searching for eggs.

The pigeon is particularly alarmed because it is guarding its nest. It complains that it has been watching for serpents day and night and has not slept for three weeks. Alice insists that she is a little girl, but the pigeon argues that little girls also eat eggs, so the distinction does not reassure it.

The scene is a classic example of Carroll’s comic logic: Alice’s changing size makes her appearance seem more important than her identity, while the pigeon treats a bizarre possibility as perfectly reasonable. The bird is specifically a pigeon, not the Dodo or the Lory, which appear elsewhere in the novel.