CHAPTER 16

The City Bird: From Sidewalk to Sky

Everything has beauty, but not everyone can see it.

—CONFUCIUS

Tales of a deep bond between birds and humans come up again and again in bird lore, and one of the most intriguing and inspiring is the story of Nikola Tesla and his pigeons. Tesla was the brilliant and wildly eccentric Serbian inventor whose work led to the adoption of alternating current, our nation’s method of electrical generation, instead of Thomas Edison’s direct current. After retirement, Tesla spiraled further into eccentricity, and he became obsessed with the pigeons in his New York neighborhood. In the 1920s and ’30s he carried a sack of bird food and cast handfuls on the ground as he walked through Bryant Park behind the New York Public Library. If he whistled, legend has it, the pigeons would flock to him, and even land on his arms and shoulders. On days when Tesla couldn’t feed them, he hired a child to take his place.

After moving to the swanky Hotel New Yorker in 1934, Tesla was warned more than once that he could no longer feed and attract the birds to his window, because it made such a mess, but he couldn’t quit them and kept at it. “Sometimes I feel that by not marrying I made too great a sacrifice, so I have decided to lavish all the attention of a man no longer young on the feathery tribe,” he told a reporter from the New York World. “I am satisfied if anything I do will live for posterity. But to care for those homeless, hungry or sick birds is the delight of my life. It is my only means of playing.”

Tesla once came across a wounded female, a white bird that he was absolutely mad about. “I have been feeding pigeons, thousands of them for years,” he wrote. “But there was one bird, a beautiful bird, pure white with light gray tips on its wings; that one was different. I had only to wish and call her and she would come flying to me. I loved that pigeon as a man loves a woman, and she loved me. As long as I had her, there was meaning to my life.” He nursed her back to health. “Using all of my mechanical knowledge I invented a device by which I supported its body in comfort to let the bones heal,” he said, and spent more than $2,000 to cure her.

One day the white dove appeared at his window and the Serb knew the end was near for his pigeon love. “As I looked at her I knew she wanted to tell me she was dying,” he said. “And then, as I got her message, there came a light from her eyes—powerful beams of light.”

“This devotion to his pigeon feeding task seemed to everyone who knew him like nothing more than the hobby of an eccentric scientist,” wrote John J. O’Neill in his book about Tesla, Prodigal Genius. “But if they would have looked into Tesla’s heart, or read his mind, they would have discovered that they were witnessing the world’s most fantastic, yet tender and pathetic, love affair.”

—

The plump, head-bobbing pigeon has been deeply intertwined with human affairs for longer than any other bird. I would even argue that the pigeon may be the closest buddy—even soul mate—from the bird world that humans have. “Pigeons are often a city child’s first contact with nature and an elderly person’s only friend,” is how New York city councilman Tony Avella put it. That might be more important than it first seems. Some scientists and conservationists think that because of the relationship, the charismatic pigeon may be the last tenuous thread between urban humans and nature, and therefore an ambassador to enlist support for protecting the world’s biodiversity outside cities.

While the pigeon fan club has many members, there’s a whole flock of people who hate them with equal fervor and would love nothing more than to rid the world of them. I wanted to know more about these two sides of the pigeon coin, and as I looked for a battleground to visit, I was surprised that instead of having to travel to the pigeon-crowded streets of New York or to St. Peter’s Square in Rome to find experts and partisans, I found an avian drama unfolding less than an hour from my house, in Butte, Montana.

Unlike any other bird, pigeons thrive in the brick and asphalt heart of cities, and it turns out that Butte is one of the most urban cities in Montana, at least from an architectural perspective. A mining town, it sits atop the so-called Richest Hill on Earth, which was shot through with veins of gold, silver, and especially copper. The glory days of the copper kings who made billions and built a city that rivaled New York and San Francisco in the frontier wilderness of Montana are long over now. The ore played out, and the population plummeted from its peak of more than 100,000 early in the twentieth century to its current 35,000 or so. Many of the historic buildings still stand, but a good many of them are empty, crumbling shells with broken windows and boarded-up doors. And it was here I found Stella Capoccia, an assistant professor at Montana Tech, whose field is something called animal geography and who is refereeing the two sides of Butte’s pigeon war.

On a sunny spring afternoon, I met Capoccia for lunch at a local eatery called the Hummingbird Cafe. She’s petite, in her thirties, and was full of energy even though she had given birth just a few weeks before. Animal geography is a field new to me. It deals with “the complex entangling of human-animal relations with space, place, location, environment and landscape,” according to a collection of research papers called Animal Spaces, Beastly Places. Capoccia worked for a time in Africa, studying how animal advocacy groups influence Kenya’s wildlife management. Then she came to the American West, landing with her husband in Butte in 2010. It turns out that Butte was in need of the services of a good animal geographer, and she was contracted by Silver Bow County, of which Butte is the county seat, to study possible solutions to the conflict.

Pigeons are at the heart of what animal geography is all about. They are found on every continent except Antarctica, and exist in places most other birds don’t, filling urban centers everywhere with their soft coos and slapping wings as they take flight. What would the world’s great cities be without these ubiquitous flocks? Cleaner for sure, but nearly devoid of nonhuman life. A flock of pigeons bursting into flight in unison lifts our gaze off the crowded and noisy streets, out of the shadows of buildings, and into the sunny sky above the fray. It’s a reminder of the natural world that exists beyond busy, hyperfocused urban lives.

One reason the pigeons are so abundant in cities is that pigeons mate more than once a year, and since they first became domesticated they have had many thousands of generations, which mean that traits prized by humans—speed, size, homing ability, docility, colors, and reproductive vigor—have all been well expressed in pigeons. Two of those traits—tameness and reproductive vigor—explain a lot about why today’s pigeons flourish in cities. The testes of the males, because they were selected for mating prowess, are substantially larger than those of their wild brethren.

In his book Feral Pigeons, the ornithologist Richard Johnston argues that the city pigeon and the wild rock dove are similar but not identical. We have taken a wild cliff dweller at home among people and selected its genetics over thousands of generations to create an urban pigeon that can survive in the most inhospitable of places, “a creature of both wild and domestic ancestors that has in a sense become the best of all possible pigeons, with capabilities transcending those of either ancestor…one of the masterpieces of nature.”

Officially the pigeon is a rock dove, in Latin Columba livia (literally, “blue [or blue-gray] dove”). Wild pigeons are usually a nickel gray, with black bars on their wings and a spray of iridescent feathers the color of an oil sheen around their neck. They belong to the same family as mourning doves, turtle doves, and passenger pigeons. The ecological niche created by the roads, alleys, cobbles, buildings, and bridges of the world’s cities and suburbs are not all that different from the treeless rock cliffs of southern Asia where the species originated millions of years ago. (Cliffs are where they developed their “burst” flying style, that sudden upward takeoff.) They didn’t eat old French fries and stale bread crusts in ancient Eurasia, of course, but many city pigeons still eat a native diet of grain and seed, in addition to human leftovers.

Among the first birds to be domesticated, between ten thousand and five thousand years ago, were the wild rock doves, who came in from the cold to live with people along the Mediterranean. They probably first cozied up to farmers, who grew the grain the birds loved. Cities then were built of mud and rock, and doves may have been kept and raised as food, or they simply moved on their own into the burgeoning urban areas, not seeing it as all that different from their wild cliff dwellings. It worked for both parties—the pigeon had a place to live free from most predators, and people had an animal companion they could harvest.

Rock doves have been more than a friend and a quick fricassee, though. They are a sacred symbol to many religions, from the dove of peace to the Holy Spirit, which appeared in bird form before Jesus as he wept and suffered on the cross. “And the Holy Ghost descended in a bodily shape,” writes Luke in the Gospels, “like a dove upon him, and a voice came from heaven, which said ‘Thou art my beloved Son; in thee I am well pleased.’ ” The dove was a symbol for Hercules and a central character in flood myths, such as the sentinel bird that the biblical boat builder Noah releases as the waters of the Great Flood begin to recede. As the Hebrew Bible tells it, the dove returns to the boat because there is no place to land, but after being released a second time, the dove appears with a green olive leaf in her beak, a sign from land that the waters are finally receding. Seven days later, when the dove is sent out yet again, it never returns, indicating the flood has passed.

Throughout history, people around the world have kept and bred pigeons for food, sport, and their beauty. Charles Darwin, himself a pigeon fancier, wrote of the sixteenth-century Mughal emperor Akbar Khan, “never less than 20,000 pigeons were taken with the court….His majesty, by crossing the breeds which method was never practiced before, has improved them astonishingly.”

The birds were raised throughout Europe and Asia for centuries, and many large homes and farms had dovecotes, aka pigeonaires, aka living pantries, where the birds roosted at night and flew out during the day to forage. Some wealthy pigeon-lovers built large, fanciful structures to match their homes that housed thousands of birds. To pay the rent the birds were harvested, and their rich droppings dug into gardens and farmland.

Pigeons began their conquest of North America in Halifax, Nova Scotia, in 1606, when they were brought to North America from Europe by the explorer Samuel de Champlain, who used the birds as a source of food during his explorations.

A pair of pigeons breed about a dozen babies per year. Young pigeons, called squab, are harvested between four and five weeks of age. Squab are near adult size, but because their flesh is youthful, their meat is far more tender, with a silky, rich texture that falls off the bone, something like dark chicken meat. Squab is still highly regarded and eaten around the world, especially in France and China.

Charles Darwin might not have arrived at his theory of evolution were it not for pigeons. He began breeding “fancy pigeons” and visiting London pigeon clubs. As he worked with them, he realized that these very extraordinary-looking birds, whether the English pouter with its oversize breast or the oriental frill-back with its poodlelike curlicue feathers, or the short-faced tumbler, which somersaults as it flies through the air, were all descended from common, ordinary rock doves. Human breeders selected for, and exaggerated, a range of different, desirable traits over centuries to create new, very distinctive, sometimes outlandish pigeon breeds. In fact, human selection so dramatically changed the look of pigeons, Darwin wrote, that they looked not only like a different species but even like a different genus. He had a revelation: If genetics are so plastic that humans could select for such traits and come up with such dramatically different outcomes, nature might do the same, selecting for traits based on factors such as weather, disease, and predators.

The National Pigeon Association, formed in 1920, today recognizes more than 450 distinct breeds, with hundreds of variations on each, all engineered by humans from the plain gray rock dove. And new breeds are still being created.

Many people, I wager, are so consumed by their everyday regimens in cities that they don’t even perceive these birds. But there’s an important story behind this tough little streetwalker scrambling for crumbs in the gutter. Pigeon intellect, for example, has been greatly underestimated. These birds learn much the way human children do, and their vision and perception are uncanny. They can tell the difference in painting style between Monet and Picasso. Their vision is so good that the Coast Guard put them to work years ago on a project called Operation Sea Hunt. Trained to spot orange objects by receiving a pellet or two of food when they did, the birds were mounted in Plexiglas domes under rescue helicopters. In choppy seas the pigeon sentinels performed much better at spotting shipwreck survivors in life vests than did human searchers.

Pigeons are the original working birds, and people have long partnered with them because of their unerring and abiding love for home. A champion homing pigeon can be released six hundred miles from home and, zipping along at more than sixty miles per hour, return within a day. This ability has made pigeons singularly useful to human communications. As far back as the fifth century B.C., a complex long-distance communication system was established between cities in Persia and Syria with pigeon couriers. In ancient Rome, results of the Olympic Games were spread via pigeon. Before the telegraph, the Rothschild banking family set up a network of pigeon lofts to house the birds in order to rapidly disseminate financial news. Paul Julius Reuter founded the news agency that still bears his name in the mid-nineteenth century first using carrier pigeons to close the seventy-eight-mile gap between Aachen, Germany, and Brussels, Belgium, with breaking news. During both World Wars, soldiers on both sides carried baskets of messenger doves into the trenches. Carrier pigeons were so essential they were deemed official members of the military and often honored for their bravery. And when German spies sent their pigeons back to Germany, the Brits used peregrine falcons to hunt them down.

The most famous war pigeon is Cher Ami, whose name means “dear friend” in French. In October 1918, during World War I, a U.S. battalion made up of more than five hundred men was surrounded by German troops at Grandpré, France, during the Battle of Argonne. Their numbers were decimated, first by the Germans, then by “friendly” artillery fire. Unable to get word to their own forces about their predicament, they started releasing their flock of carrier pigeons one at a time. And, one at a time, the birds were shot down by German fire. Down to their very last bird, Cher Ami, the desperate battalion dispatched him into the air with a note rolled up inside a small canister fixed to his leg that read: We are along the road parallel to 276.4. Our own artillery is dropping a barrage directly on us. For heaven’s sake, stop it!

As the Germans spied Cher Ami flapping furiously through the smoke-filled air, intent on his intelligence mission, they opened up on him. Though one leg was hit and a bullet lodged in his breast, the fearless bird defied the deadly fusillade. Just sixty-five minutes later he glided into his loft at division headquarters, twenty-five miles away. The bombardment was immediately halted. Cher Ami’s heroic journey saved the last survivors of the Lost Battalion, 194 soldiers, and for that he was awarded the Croix de Guerre. Cher Ami died in June 1919 from his wounds and now sits stuffed atop his lone leg at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C.

The era of the message-carrying homing pigeon is not over. The People’s Liberation Army of China, one of the largest military forces in the world, recently created a bird corps—ten thousand pigeons to carry messages in case its high-tech communication systems break down.

Yet for everyone who sees in the pigeon a friend and ally, there is someone who sees what Woody Allen disparagingly called a “rat with wings,” and not without reason. Though scientists say the risk of pigeons passing disease to humans is infinitesimally low, one bird produces twenty-five pounds of waste a year, and though it is a great boon to farmers, the mixture is so acidic it eats through paint, and damage to buildings in the United States from pigeon poop is pegged at over a billion dollars a year. City dwellers have tried various tactics to get rid of them, from introducing pigeon-eating falcons to smearing a sticky gel on windowsills to prevent roosting, to shooting catapults of thick-roped net over the flocks so that the birds may be hauled away and asphyxiated. Then there’s the old switcheroo—workers sneak in when pigeons leave the nest and replace their real eggs with artificial ones that never hatch.

The very best way to reduce pigeon numbers, Capoccia says over lunch, “is the elimination of their nest and feeding options.” So in Butte, the first step toward decreasing the pigeon population is asking building owners to board up holes in the myriad empty buildings. It sounds like an easy fix, but the large number of absentee landlords makes the task difficult. Keeping people from feeding birds is second on the list, though putting this into practice is also more difficult than it might seem. There is no shortage of people who feel morally obligated to feed pigeons. On the edge of uptown Butte, Capoccia points out a small brick miner’s shack painted pink, with pigeons sitting on power lines and rooftops nearby. “An elderly woman lived there and used to feed the pigeons every day,” she says. When the woman died she bequeathed the task to her son, which he dutifully carries out. Hundreds of birds still gather here to await the nightly tossing of the bread, although it’s against municipal law.

Some cities, though, are experiencing success in reducing their pigeon populations. London’s Trafalgar Square was once, famously, a pigeon heaven, with vast seas of birds swarming around the ankles of tourists. In spite of protests from people who enjoyed the birds, the mayor banned vendors from selling corn to feed them, and Harris’s hawks were brought in to hunt them. As a result, pigeon numbers dropped from several thousand to virtually none.

The effort in Butte isn’t to wipe out pigeons completely—just to reduce their numbers and the damage they cause. The wishes of pigeon lovers to have the birds around should be honored as well, Capoccia says, so it’s good to increase tolerance for the birds in those places where they can live without being a nuisance—on the old towering metal head frames that once lowered the miners into the shafts beneath the city, for example, which still dot Butte’s urban landscape. It’s important that people in cities maintain a connection to nature, she believes.

A definitive text for understanding the deep emotional nature of the pigeon-human relationship is the 2013 book The Global Pigeon by Colin Jerolmack, an assistant professor of sociology at New York University who traveled the world to study the deep bond between urban rock doves and city dwellers. Some of his studies looked at people who fly the bird for sport. By setting a bird free on a four-hundred-mile marathon and then having it return, pigeon fliers, Jerolmack writes, are “vicariously engaged in a dramatic struggle against the powerful and hostile forces of nature, without leaving their roof.” When, and if, the bird returns home, it’s a “magical, miraculous triumph of nurture over nature.”

Pigeon flying also provides bird fliers with what he calls a “social self,” a sense of identity in a community, and often a link both to the past and to other cultures. In Berlin, Turkish pigeon fliers carved out their “Turkish space” with their hobby and reinforced ethnic bonds. An elderly Italian American pigeon racer Jerolmack profiled, Carmine Gangone, forged a connection to young Hispanic and black men who, new to his neighborhood, fell hard for the birds and wanted to learn the sport. Pigeon racing has proved itself as a way, then, he writes, “to transcend race and ethnicity.”

But what about the birds, I wondered. Is this love affair requited? Do they enjoy not just our food but our companionship? No one can provide a definitive answer, at least not with any scientific authority. But not long after my trip to Butte, a friend in Helena, twelve-year-old Tara Atkins, told me a tale about her pet pigeon, named Foresta. Born and raised in the Elkhorn Mountains, well outside of Helena, Foresta had never been into town. The bird escaped one day, and Tara and her parents couldn’t find her. They left for town with the bird on the loose, and they worried about her. Later that day Foresta showed up at Tara’s school during recess, alighting on a teacher’s bald head before she was captured. Somehow Foresta knew where to find Tara, though she had never been anywhere near the school. The story was written up by the local paper and went global on newswire services.

Is pigeon love—feeling a connection to these birds—just an eccentricity of some people? Or does it exemplify a bond we have with birds? With all animals? Is it an inherent longing, a deep hunger for nature? Are our feelings for birds something fundamental in the human condition that, living in the noise and haste and stress of cities, we’ve mostly lost the ability to access or perceive? There’s a lesson, I believe, in the story of a couple of pigeon lovers in New York I spoke with, Eugene and Kaoria Oda, whom I heard about from a group called People for the Preservation of Pigeons. “We weren’t really interested in pigeons, or any kind of animal at all,” Eugene said as he told me his story. “Then a pigeon couple started making a nest on the AC unit and it caught our attention. All of a sudden we started looking for pigeons. We always walked past them, we always knew they were there, but we never actually saw them. We started looking at them. We started thinking, ‘Oh, what charming creatures they are.’ ”

Their bird switch really flipped when the Odas noticed a pigeon on the street in Astoria, Queens, that appeared listless and perhaps ill. “At first we were scared to pick it up; we had never touched a pigeon before,” Eugene told me. “But my wife got really brave.” They brought it home, and soon they took in another injured pigeon. Eugene started volunteering at the Wild Bird Fund to learn how to patch up their growing collection of injured pigeons. And he started his own rehab operation in their apartment, turning their only bedroom into an ICU while he and Kaoria slept in the living room. They keep about twenty birds at home, treating them with medicine, tiny slings and splints for broken wings and legs, and sometimes just bed rest. They name the birds they bring home alphabetically, and in 2012 they went through the alphabet eight times. If a bird recovers, they free it. Adults get returned to the place where they were found, though with babies it’s different—they get a soft release. “I spread some birdseed on the ground, so a flock gathers there, and you let the baby watch for a while,” Eugene said. “You do that every day and after five days they start trying to get out. They are kind of scared at first, but eventually they join the flock.”

This love for the urban pigeon, some scientists think, may be far more than just a curiosity. It may play a key role in stanching the disappearance of global biodiversity. The Pigeon Paradox is a theory that proposes that the pigeon, the most charismatic and accessible of urban species, is vital to protecting all of the world’s biodiversity. Because half the world’s population (and 80 percent of Americans) live in cities, it’s essential to keep an experience of nature alive, research shows, because it encourages environmental sensitivity. “The future of conservation depends on urban people’s ability to experience nature,” the authors of a research paper titled “The Pigeon Paradox” write. “The complex coos of doves can be soothing and the lives of doves can open the door into a broader interest in wild nature.”

The tale of Eugene and Kaoria Oda is a parable for our time regarding our relationship to the natural world and our longing to reconnect with it. One day the couple serendipitously awoke to the glory of pigeons and other birds, and this new transcendent relationship changed their lives. But just being in close proximity to a flock of pigeons isn’t enough. That’s a starting point, but the real battle to establish a connection to nature is in large measure within ourselves. We must change the way we perceive the natural world. We need to get out into nature, learn more about it, and find new ways of seeing it, the way the Odas taught themselves to see birds. We need a change in perception, to move birds and nature from the background of our lives to the foreground. This is true today more than ever, and birds have something to teach us about that, too.