I WAS STANDING ON THE TOP rung of a rickety old extension ladder, trying to get my hands over the ledge of a concrete support beneath the Higgins Street Bridge in downtown Missoula. While I was primarily worried about falling and dying, I was also afraid of getting in trouble with the cops. The area beneath the bridge serves as a parking lot for the Wilma Building, an eight-story mound of brickwork that houses apartments, a movie theater, and about a trillion pigeons. For whatever reason, police cars stalk through the parking lot every ten minutes or so. I couldn’t imagine something that looked more like suspicious terrorist activity than the sight of two dudes in dark clothes climbing around beneath a bridge at night. Moisan was stabilizing the ladder and keeping an eye out for trouble. He was urging me to hurry up before someone came along.
“Come on, man,” he yelled. “You just know there’s a bunch of pigeon eggs up there. Get your ass up that ladder.”
I had my cheek pressed against the bridge’s concrete girders, but I couldn’t quite reach. Looking down, I could just see the top of Moisan’s head. He’s got this crazy hair; every couple of months he gets a crew cut, but it seems to morph almost overnight into a pompadour. He and I became friends through a strange set of circumstances that involved both of us having relationships with the same girl at the same time. Eventually the girl dumped us both and moved away. Rather than holding grudges, he and I started a friendship, and he eventually became hunting partners with my brothers and me.
I climbed back down and we propped the ladder on top of a stack of busted-up shipping pallets, so that it was now blocking the underpass. I scurried back up the ladder.
“Now hurry the hell up,” said Moisan.
“Just hold that ladder,” I whispered back. I stood on my tippy-toes, reaching up as far as I could. I got my hands over the top ledge and dug my fingertips into a mat of pigeon shit and something that felt like drinking straws. I pulled myself up like I was doing a gym class exercise. I got one elbow over the top of the support, and then the other. I had my penlight between my teeth, and I tried to get the beam pointing in the right direction. When I did, I was looking into a pigeon nest that was indeed made of drinking straws, both the big kind and the little ones you get in mixed drinks. I removed the penlight from my mouth in order to yell this piece of information down to Moisan. Then I noticed that the base of the nest was formed by two mummified pigeons and a mound of droppings the size and shape of a deflated basketball. “Oh, jeez,” I shouted, “and it’s also built out of shit and dead pigeons.”
There were two eggs in the nest. I’d heard that pigeons will nest in the winter, and here was proof. The eggs were whitish, with slight off-color markings. They were about the size of big olives. I deposited them into the hood of my sweatshirt. By waddling along the edge of the support on my elbows, I managed to check out another five or six nests. No more eggs. I wriggled back down until I was hanging from my fingertips. Moisan adjusted the ladder to meet my dangling toes. Back on the ground, I arranged the eggs in a Cool Whip container lined with toilet paper. Moisan tucked the container inside his jacket to keep it at body temperature, and then we shouldered the ladder and lugged it along to the next bridge support.
We were collecting the eggs as part of an ongoing (and so far unsuccessful) attempt to procure some baby street pigeons. I’d eaten a few adult pigeons over the years, ones I’d shot while out hunting for other stuff, and I never really considered them to be top-shelf table fare. I’d usually pop the breasts out and toss them in the oven for ten minutes. I found the meat to be dry and tough, like a thick slice of dark turkey meat if you overcooked it and then left it uncovered in your fridge for a couple of days.
According to Escoffier, I’d gone about my pigeon eating all wrong. “Young pigeons are not very highly esteemed by gourmets,” he lamented, “and this is more particularly to be regretted, since when the birds are of excellent quality, they are worthy of the best tables.” But, he cautions, “those older than one year should be viewed as being old and should be completely excluded from use except for the preparation of forcemeat.”
For culinary purposes, a young pigeon, commonly known as a squab, is a fattened, flightless street pigeon less than one year old. The only way to get a truly legitimate squab (Escoffier called them pigeonneaux) is to keep it in a cage; otherwise, the bird will start flying around when it’s about thirty days old and it’ll never get very fat. When I first started seriously collecting ingredients for my Escoffier feast, it seemed as though baby pigeons would be the easiest thing on my list. My initial idea was to catch some full-grown pigeons and let them procreate in captivity. First I called the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife, and Parks to check on the legal aspects of pigeon collecting. Because the birds are regarded as a nonnative pest, they can be taken at any time with any method, and their eggs and nests may be legally destroyed. When I first called Moisan and proposed that we get together some night and catch a bunch of pigeons, he’d agreed that it would be a piece of cake. We met up at the house where I was living, a scuzzy shithole that was divided into four apartments. I lived in the basement, a dark, cellar-like pit with one-half of a window and a steep, narrow staircase that made me feel like I was emerging from a foxhole every time I came outside. Above me, on the ground floor, were two regular apartments. Above those was a small loft-type apartment with a long, rickety staircase terminating at an entryway shelter that brought to mind a gigantic doghouse. This upper apartment was occupied by a peroxide-haired white guy in his mid-twenties who fancied himself some sort of inner-city rap gangster. This is a hard image to pull off in a cushy mountain town, but he did his best by wearing loads of gold chains and athletic suits, investing heavily in car stereo equipment, and flashing menacing hand signals at kids passing to and from the local high school. Diana and I referred to him simply as Gangsta.
When I first moved into that apartment, I witnessed three interesting Gangsta-related events: He rigged his own staircase with motion detector lights; a gang of thugs destroyed his van with baseball bats; and two pigeons built a nest outside his window. Every morning, the two pigeons would flutter to the top of the roof to engage in explicit sexual acts, punctuated by explosive bouts of cooing. Afterwards, the birds would circle the house like stars orbiting the head of a cartoon character who’s been bonked by a hammer; then they’d fly off. Judging by their sexual appetites, I suspected that they would handily produce a clutch of squab, so I wanted to catch them.
You might say that Moisan’s and my attempt at the rooftop pigeons was unnecessarily complicated. After securing trespass permission from Gangsta (who had offered to kill the cooing pigeons with his handgun), we waited for the birds to fly off. Then we climbed to the peak of the roof. Moisan held my ankles and I hung my body over the edge so that I was looking under the eaves at their empty roost. I screwed the top of a square-shaped minnow net to the side of the house, below the roost. Next I fastened a dowel to the free-hanging end of the net. I tied a long piece of parachute cord to each end of the dowel, then looped the cords through screw eyes driven into the eave of the house.
Moisan climbed down to the ground. He rigged his end of the lines through two more screw eyes driven into the house near ground level. The cords were adjusted so that pulling them from the ground lifted the net, blocking the escape of the pigeons from their perch. As a last step, Moisan pounded a nail into the house, so that once the net was engaged, the line could be secured and the operator could climb up and retrieve the birds.
I was convinced that this device would work, given a chance. The problem was, the pigeons wouldn’t go near the roost with that net hanging there. It seemed as though they’d eventually get used to it and return, but they never did.
Moisan suggested that we start going downtown to look for pigeons at night. Downtown pigeon hunting proved to be much more fun than trying to trap pigeons at my house; it had all the excitement and secretive tactics of vandalism or graffiti, without the negative moral ramifications. And it was much more productive.
It turns out that the Achilles’ heel of a pigeon is its proclivity for spending the night tucked behind air-conditioning units, a weakness we discovered while cruising alleyways behind rows of bars and restaurants. The units are mounted a few inches away from each building, forming little nooks. It seemed as though a fellow could easily climb up to these units and block off the exits with a net.
The next night we set off wearing dark clothes, toting along one of those ventilated carriers people use to transport pet dogs on airplanes. We started out behind an Irish pub. A car full of old blueprints and newspapers was parked beneath the AC unit. I used the car’s trunk as a foothold to climb up the wall, and Moisan used the hood. He held a blocking mechanism, a pizza box taped to a long pipe. I had a net, also taped to a long pipe. With the box, Moisan blocked one end of the unit. Simultaneously, I thrust the net over the other exit and a nearly black pigeon flew squarely into the net. I lowered the net down and transferred the bird to the cage. Satisfied with ourselves, we hid the cage and nets and moseyed into the pub for a drink. After a few nights of this, I was sharing my apartment with six pigeons.
Bringing the pigeons into my home did not make Diana very excited about coming over. She found the idea of keeping pigeons in your apartment so you could eat their babies repugnant. The pigeons cooed a lot, which I interpreted as a sign of contentment. Diana thought the cooing sounded desperate and sad. As we argued about this, I told her about my desire to adhere to a strict interpretation of Le Guide Culinaire whenever possible.
“And since I’m being so strict,” I said, “I have to keep these pigeons until they produce squab. I can’t settle for anything less than the real thing on this particular ingredient.”
“Steve,” she said, “if you’re so concerned with authenticity, you shouldn’t talk so much about a cookbook that you can’t even pronounce. It’s annoying.”
This was something I hadn’t even considered. I pronounced the book’s title like this: For Le, I said “la” to denote the Frenchness of the title. I pronounced Guide just as you would in English. I pronounced Culinaire phonetically, because I hate when people who speak regular American English come to a word like croissant and suddenly affect a phony French accent. Whenever I defend my stance on this subject, I point out that I don’t pronounce my last name with an Italian accent, which, if I did, would bug the shit out of everybody.
Diana dialed her best friend, Julie, who lives in Boston, where Diana grew up. Julie speaks fluent French because her mother is French. Diana spelled the book’s title to Julie and asked her to pronounce it to me. I wasn’t too far off on the Le part, which is fairly straight forward. Guide is “Geed,” with a hard g. Culinaire is some tangled-up mess and my efforts to say it made me sound ultrapretentious and stupid, though coming from Julie’s lips, the word sounded beautiful. I decided that I might start calling the cookbook Le Geed in conversation, depending on the sensibilities of the person I was talking to.
I was way more concerned about my pigeons than I was about my French. As my apartment filled with the smells and sounds of live pigeons, I felt inclined to study up on the birds, to learn about their care and breeding.
It made sense that pigeons would be easy to take care of, because they were probably the first bird domesticated by man. The common pigeon is a descendant of a Eurasian cliff-dwelling bird, and representations of pigeons appear on figurines, mosaics, and coins dating back to 4500 BC, in Mesopotamia. In an Egyptian tomb dating from the third millennium BC, archaeologists found a vat of preserved pigeon stew. And ever since the Egyptians, people have been carrying pigeons around from place to place. The French introduced the common street pigeon to North America before North America had streets. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, French settlers brought flocks of domesticated pigeons across the Atlantic Ocean to supplement the often scanty supplies of wild food found near their settlements along the St. Lawrence River. Many of the birds escaped captivity or were released, and the flocks thrived and spread southward across the whole continent.
I learned, too, that a pair of pigeons with adequate food and water will produce up to four clutches a year. But when it came to my pigeons, no two birds took even the slightest romantic interest in each other. I waited weeks for this to happen, but it didn’t. Aside from that, they seemed perfectly comfortable. They ate and drank and cooed and preened and perched. But no sex. No eggs.
And that is why, one night, I found myself standing on my tiptoes atop an extension ladder with my fingertips sunk into a loaf of pigeon shit beneath the Higgins Street Bridge. Since my birds didn’t want to lay eggs, I’d give them some eggs that they could raise as surrogate parents. When I got back to my apartment with the kidnapped eggs, I fashioned a nest out of a soup bowl and toilet paper. I nestled the eggs into the bowl and placed them in the cage. The pigeons just sat on their perch. In the morning, they were still sitting on their perch. I gave them a day to think it over, but still no one opted to care for the eggs. I pulled the eggs back out of the cage and hard-boiled them.
A few days later, while I was vacuuming pigeon feathers and fretting over the birds’ blunt refusal to foster the eggs, I got to thinking about something I’d read. The ancient Romans—who ate their own fair share of squab—believed that captive birds were capable of homesickness. The Romans built their aviaries with very small windows and no good views. They thought that if the birds could see trees, they’d be sad and wouldn’t get fat. I’d put my pigeon cage next to a small half-window. I took a peek out the window, and sure enough, there was an apple tree out there. Maybe that’s why they wouldn’t care for the eggs.
I was fixing to move the cage when a buddy of mine, Fred, stopped by my apartment. Fred took one look at the birds and said, “Personally, I think pigeons are disgusting.”
This upset me. “Sure, they make a mess everywhere and eat people’s garbage, but that’s what any animal would do if you turned it loose in town,” I said. “If chickens were pecking around in the streets, you’d think they were gross too.”
“No, I wouldn’t.”
“Yeah, you would.”
“Crows run around in the streets,” he replied, “and I don’t think crows are gross. Same with sparrows. But pigeons carry bubonic plague.”
Fred has often told me that squirrels carry bubonic plague. He’s a tree surgeon, so he’s naturally disposed to despise squirrels.
“You think everything has bubonic plague,” I said.
“Well,” said Fred, “you just wait and see.”
I decided to study a little more about why exactly pigeons are considered pests by so many people. I found that pigeons can carry aspergillosis, avian tuberculosis, coccidiosis, cryptococcosis, encephalitis, histoplasmosis, Newcastle disease, salmonellosis, thrush, toxoplasmosis, West Nile virus, and a nasty little mite that can cause skin irritations in humans. As for bubonic plague, which wiped out one-third of Europe in the fourteenth century, Fred must have been thinking of the Norway rat.
Needless to say, I became a little paranoid about the pigeons living in my apartment. If my arm had an itch, I just knew it was mites. When I woke up in the middle of the night, I would lie there quietly, trying to feel mites crawling on me. I didn’t mention any of this to Diana, but when I saw her scratch her head a couple of times one day, I knew that the pigeons had to go.
Luckily I knew a guy named Cody who had an empty chicken coop. Cody’s about forty but seems way older. He looks like one of those bearded, hollow-eyed Confederate soldiers lying dead on the battlefield after Gettysburg. He lives up the Bitterroot River, which drains the Bitterroot and Sapphire Mountains and then flows toward Missoula from the south. Whenever Cody comes down into Missoula, he talks about how much more severe conditions are up the Bitterroot. It’s colder and snowier and windier up the Bitterroot; the roads are icier. In the summer, he always says it’s hotter and drier up the Bitterroot, with a much greater risk of things like wildfires and bear attacks. In his defense, Cody did get attacked by a bear in his own yard. And a weasel had gotten into his chicken coop and destroyed the occupants, hence my idea to relocate my birds to that vacated space.
I went to Cody and explained that I couldn’t keep the pigeons in my apartment because of my worries about infecting myself and others with skin mites. I told him that I’d like to move the birds into his vacated coop while I waited for them to pair up and produce a dozen or so squab. He took my request as an admission from me that Missoula is a fainthearted place for the weak and overly civilized.
“Yup,” he agreed, “those pigeons would be better off up the Bitterroot. You’re going to laugh”—Cody always precedes information with the prophecy that you will laugh upon hearing it—“but I’ve been wanting some pigeons to train my dogs with.”
“Well,” I said, “if this all works out, maybe we’ll see about that.”
So Cody took the pigeons up the Bitterroot. I was feeling pretty good about the whole situation. I pictured myself off having a good time while my captured birds cranked out a perpetual stream of genuine flightless squab. At that moment, it would have been next to impossible to spoil my happiness and my sense of accomplishment. In fact, the only thing that could have spoiled it would have been Cody’s admitting that he planned on screwing me over and stealing my squab. But he kept quiet about that, so for the moment I was truly, deeply content.