Yes, New York, There Are Baby Pigeons

I’ve never found anything the least bit cute or winning about pigeons. A city without them would be fine with me. My husband was more than indifferent. He called them flying rats and marveled that a few of our neighbors actually shook out bags of food for them in the park across the street, attracting gluttonous crowds. But our hardheartedness was recently put to the ultimate test.

We returned home from a trip to find that the six-inch south ledge of our French windows had been selected as the site of a well-built, good-sized nest. This seemed a typical example of New York City nerve—the minute you leave your apartment, by death or a lesser mode, someone else tries to take it over. My first instinct was to throw the thing out. Luckily I had more urgent tasks. The next morning it held two cream-colored eggs, slightly larger than the kind we crack for breakfast. Even I couldn’t be that callous. Besides, in these eggs nestled the answer to a riddle that has long perplexed residents of a pigeon-riddled city: can baby pigeons really exist if no one ever sees them?

From that day on, the eggs were never alone. A plump, gray-black pigeon of the ubiquitous type sat on them round the clock, with only an excursion now and then, for food, we assumed. Other pigeons visited, perched on the rail like protectors. A frequent visitor was an unusual cocoa-colored bird that we fancifully decided was the father; he had a proprietary air.

We took to checking the eggs several times a day, hoping to catch the moment of hatching. Did the family know when we were there? Were they waiting for privacy? Abashed, we realized we were behaving like fond grandparents, practically tiptoeing near the window and talking in whispers so as not to startle the tots.

Whether by chance or pigeon cunning, the dramatic moment eluded us. One morning three weeks later, the eggs were gone and in their place were two quivering creatures—yes, indeed, they exist!—the size and color of baby chicks: very unpigeonlike, they were covered with a pale yellow translucent down. Could there be some mistake? We watched more curiously.

To our surprise, even alarm, the mother bird sat on the newly hatched chicks exactly as she’d sat on the eggs. We were afraid she’d crush them, but we had to assume she knew her business. She would flutter about, maybe smoothing their yellow feathers. Friends and family, including the self-assured brown bird, continued to stop by, sometimes settling in right beside the nest. Only very rarely did the mother get off the birds and take flight, always leaving them guarded by one of her cronies. Several times we caught her feeding them, mouth to mouth. It was hard not to feel slightly sentimental about it all.

To begin with, the baby birds grew slowly, but then the rate became startling. After about a week and a half they were the size of common robins, then ducklings. The yellow down grew more translucent, revealing the far less attractive pigeon colors beneath, until the young were a mottled blend of yellow and gray. When they began to stir in their nests, we imagined, anthropomorphically, that they might be tired of being sat on so relentlessly.

At two and a half weeks they were restless, shifting about and trying to stand; now they were chubby, no longer yellow at all but clearly, disappointingly, pigeons. One of them showed a distinctive brown tint, supporting our hunch that the frequent visitor was indeed their dad.

Around this time, our idyllic little foray into the ways of nature, urban-style, began to lose its romantic glow. The nest, once so impressive a design of twigs, was becoming dotted with, to be polite, guano. More and more each day.

The babies, though, were still appealing, about half the size of grown pigeons. Sitting on them, the mother was high in the nest, like a ship high in the water. At last they rose to their feet, ready to move, and to our relief, the mother got off and let them have a look at the world beyond her bottom. A few days later, we spied the adolescent birds, two-thirds of full pigeon size now, taking some first fumbling steps on the ledge, the gray-black one more daring and sure-footed than the pale brown.

This was an exciting reward for our patience. Alas, it also gave us a chance to get a better look at the nest: unsightly, with patches of white everywhere obscuring its intricate structure. It was quite distasteful to imagine the birds climbing back in after their exploratory strolls.

Under the watchful eye of the mother, the young pigeons (one completely brown by now) began to make tentative liftoffs from the ledge. But for us it was all downhill from that point. Though there was still a fresh, new allure about the pair, they were nearly full-grown and had become unmistakably what we had never much liked in the first place: pigeons. Observing them at close range was no longer the great adventure it had been in their days of smallness and cuteness. As for the nest, it was, in a word, vile. Covered in white paste. As the attempts at flight became more successful, we grasped that the birds would soon be gone, and like thoughtless houseguests, they would not be cleaning up after themselves.

The morning we found the ledge deserted we were nostalgic, I must admit. But our feelings were mixed. The six-week romance of the life cycle was over, and our hospitality had contributed two more common urban pests to the already vast population. It had begun with the delight of finding the eggs, then the wonder of the delicate, trembling yellow creatures, and it all ended in a pile of guano. Food for thought, as it were. It was best not to probe too deeply its metaphorical allusions. Sentiment past, we got the plastic bag, put on the rubber gloves, and set to work.