Disgust compelled me to pigeons. For most of my life I hadn’t thought much about the birds. They were always there, invisible in their omnipresence. I suppose I must have regarded them with curiosity at some point in my childhood, but there’s something fundamentally uninteresting about pigeons, perhaps by design. It’s almost as if they evolved a form of camouflage that helps humans accept their presence. This isn’t a camouflage against sight—they are plainly visible and not the least bit furtive—it’s a kind of psychological camouflage, like a Jedi mind trick. Their bearing tells humans that these aren’t the birds we’re looking for, that they are not a threat, not indicative of anything in particular, but instead are unremarkable, as easily forgotten as the air, everywhere and unseen.
It makes some sense, then, that I started thinking about pigeons only once I had been shat upon. This, I would learn, is a common initiation (a baptism of sorts) into pigeon research. I found one writer after another who reported having begun paying attention to the birds after a—presumably learned, scholarly—pigeon anointed them from above.
The pigeon that elected me was an Argentinian pigeon. I was spending a few months in Buenos Aires, where pigeons are everywhere. Another thing they have everywhere in Buenos Aires is a type of cookie, the alfajor, made with the whitest of flours and dulce de leche (which is basically caramel, cubed). I ate one made with chocolate dulce de leche one evening as I was hurrying to a friend’s apartment for dinner. I was brushing the last crumbs off my fingers as I trotted down the subway stairs. It was dusk, so I didn’t see the white and brown globule on my sweater until I walked under the subway lights. It was about the size of my fingernail—a cookie crumb, right? Oh no, Nate. No. Not right.
Without thinking, I scooped up what in reality was a pigeon turd and popped it in my mouth. I spent the next several minutes on the platform flinging my hands in the air, spitting onto the tracks, turning in tight circles, and silently screaming. The other riders waiting must have wondered what they were witnessing.
Perhaps it was just coincidence, but a few hours later I grew ill. The nausea hit me just as my host served the second course—awkward timing. I reclined on the floor, broke into a cold sweat, and then settled in for a serious fever.
After that, things weren’t so cool between the pigeons and me for a while. In fact, it’s only recently, as I’ve begun to understand their capacities (beyond spreading filth), that I’ve gained respect for them. In the beginning, my interest in pigeons sprang purely from loathing and a potent desire to maintain distance between us. When they flew too close, I thrashed spastically at the air. I yelled and kicked at the ones that came begging near my feet. My eye sought signs of mange and disease to confirm that these were utterly revolting beasts. As I watched them, however, I also began to notice things. I noticed, for instance, that as many as half the birds in some flocks had only one good leg. They hopped around, many holding a leg gingerly off the ground. Sometimes the leg ended in a misshapen bulb. It was totally gross, but also interesting: Disgust led me to observe pigeons closely for the first time, and I then noticed something I had previously been blind to. Of course, it was something that validated my revulsion, but it also drew me in. What the heck, I wanted to know, was wrong with pigeon feet?
I should pause to say a word about disgust, because, before gathering the information that eventually endeared pigeons to me, I spent a lot of time accumulating evidence that affirmed my fears—in other words, what you learn here is going to get worse before it gets better. But it does get better. The more time people spend studying pigeons, it seems, the fonder they grow of them. For instance, here’s what two of the foremost pigeon researchers, Richard Johnston and Marián Janiga, write in their book Feral Pigeons:
Our chief concern in the pages to follow is to describe and analyze the biology of the feral pigeon, which we consider to be one of the masterpieces of nature. Some readers will wonder at the idea of “masterpiece” being applied to what they think of as a pest, but we hope they ultimately will join us in our opinion.
I haven’t gotten all the way to “masterpiece,” but what I learned about pigeons turned my revulsion into curiosity, and then, gradually, admiration. Disgust is not such a bad place to begin an inquiry. It’s a good, honest emotion. It’s one of those primitive reactions that simply calls a threat into focus—Heads up, you’ve been shat upon by yonder fleabag. If my interest instead began with awe, then I’d be in real trouble, because the thing that prompted me to begin digging up information would also prompt me to ignore or distort any unpleasantness I might find.
I wasn’t the only one who had noticed the gross pigeon feet. A Seattle weekly newspaper, The Stranger, ran an article on the subject, but the experts the writer consulted had contradictory theories. One blamed predators—cats and falcons—but what predator is going to be sated by a toe? Why do they so consistently injure pigeons’ feet? Another suggested that the problem was infection (with staphylococcus, perhaps). Maybe, but then, why are pigeons more commonly infected than sparrows? Another theory: Hair and string get knotted around pigeons’ feet, and they have no way to untangle themselves. Again, why don’t we see the same problem with other city birds? The mystery was unsolved, as far as I was concerned.
I spent my next few days in dusty library stacks looking for information about pigeon feet. As I paged through these books, I found a lot of fascinating stuff I hadn’t been looking for. It was a revelation, for example, to read the simple description of a pigeon’s appearance, because it made it clear that I’d actually never seen the birds—not really, in any meaningful way. If you’d have asked me to describe them, I couldn’t have told you much more than: gray and gross. But reading the descriptions in these books was like seeing the grubby neighbor girl in a designer gown at the Oscars. I glimpsed them anew, dressed up in formal prose. The rock pigeon is not just gray, but “dove gray,” “with deep purple iridescence at the neck that varies with the angle of the light,” a “bold black median bar,” and “axillaries and underwing coverts of brilliant white.”
This is a description of a thing of noble beauty, the sort of creature you might find on a family crest, a bird to inspire religious metaphors. And in fact it has: For most of history there was no distinction between (scruffy) pigeons and (iconic) doves. That bird that brought Noah, while on the ark, the first sign of dry land? If you go back to the Hebrew, the word for that bird actually translates to “of the pigeon type.” But at some point people began thinking of doves and pigeons differently. They are all in the same family—it’s just that somewhere along the line certain species arbitrarily acquired the common name “dove,” while others got called “pigeon.” Some got both: Columba palumbus has been called both a “ring dove” and a “wood pigeon.” In her book Superdove, Courtney Humphries suggests that it was Shakespeare that solidified the division between pigeons and doves. In Shakespeare’s work, pigeons always play a functional role, while the parts for doves are consistently symbolic. The dove is “equated with peace, modesty, patience, love and other noble ideals.” The pigeon usually just shows up on a dinner plate. The dove is metaphoric, the pigeon is mundane. And this division has stuck, Humphries writes: “We never talk of pigeons of peace or dove droppings on statues. ‘Dove’ is a pleasant enough title to grace chocolate bars and soap, while ‘pigeon’ has no marketing appeal.” Imagine if John the Baptist had said he saw the Holy Spirit descending to Jesus “like a pigeon.”
But if you are interested in getting past the marketing appeal, past the flash and dazzle of meanings we’ve imposed upon nature, and instead simply seeing nature, the pigeon is a great place to start. Has any other creature lived so closely with us, while so successfully avoiding the romantic varnish of human imagination?
As I read on, still seeking the solution to the mystery of the ugly feet but pleasantly diverted, I saw what I always see when confronted with the reality of the living world: Unvarnished nature is far more wondrous than our romantic artifice.
If you start watching pigeons, one of the first things you’ll notice is that you never see a chick. Like some mythical beast, these birds reveal themselves to humans only after reaching maturity. There are two good reasons for this: First, pigeons are good at hiding their nests; and second, the young birds—called squabs—stay in the nest until they lose the obvious indicators of youth.
They are able to do this because mother and father pigeon work together to provide for their young. This equality in parenting extends to milk production: Both males and females secrete a cheesy yellow milk into the crop, a food-storage pouch partway down the throat. I had thought that milk belonged exclusively to mammals; it’s our defining characteristic, so important that we are named for it—“mammal” comes from the Latin mamma, meaning breast. Pigeons are more closely related to dinosaurs than mammals. Like breast milk, pigeon milk contains antibodies and immune-system regulators. Like breast milk, it is stimulated by the hormone prolactin; in fact, scientists discovered prolactin while studying pigeons. Despite the similarities, mammal milk isn’t a relative of pigeon milk. Instead, it is an example of convergent evolution: a strikingly similar trait that arose independently in different branches of the tree of life.
As milk scientist Katie Hinde has written on her blog, Mammels Suck: “The production of milk independently arose after the divergence of avian and mammalian lineages over 300 million years ago. However, these milks seemingly serve the same function: body-nourishing, bacteria-inoculating, immune-programming substances produced by parents specifically to support offspring development.”
Milk, in other words, is so useful that evolution created it twice.
Pigeon milk has much more protein, and much less sugar and fat, than human milk. On this diet, young pigeons often double their weight in a single day. The squabs stick their heads into their parents’ mouths, thrust vigorously, and suck up a regurgitated meal. They do this for two months, after which they are relatively mature. Many other bird species leave the nest after just two or three weeks.
There are a few characteristics that distinguish a juvenile pigeon. You can look for an oversized beak—it takes them a while to grow into it—or for a pinkish-gray blob of skin where the beak meets the head; this cere turns white as they mature. But the most salient clue is the color of the eyes: Juveniles have brown eyes, whereas adult pigeons have shockingly bright, reddish-orange eyes, another of those extraordinary details I’d never noticed until I started looking for it.
The other reason you’re unlikely to see young pigeons is that the nests are hidden. Pigeons were originally cliff-dwelling birds, seeking out caves in rock faces. In cities, they do much the same: The perfect pigeon-nesting location might be an abandoned apartment halfway up an old building, or a new one; workers often find pigeon nests in partially completed towers. They like to squeeze into cavelike sanctuaries protected from the weather and predators, with a flat floor to keep eggs from rolling away.
Though pigeons masterfully hide their homes, they are terrible at building them. Often, a nest consists of no more than a few twigs haphazardly arranged on a flat surface. “Most pigeons surely do not qualify as master architects,” Johnston wrote. Unlike the birds that do qualify for this title—the swallows and Baya weavers, which suspend their nests from undersurfaces—pigeons that nest on narrow ledges sometimes send eggs plummeting to the pavement below.
Pigeon nests build up over time, because the birds return to the same spot. With each laying, the parents add a few twigs, but the bulk of each nest seems to consist mostly of the birds themselves. And this, if crop milk hasn’t already induced nausea, is where it gets gross. The young back up to the edge of the nest and poop off the side, building up a rim of guano. A healthy pair of pigeons can lay six times a year—two eggs each time—and after few years, all those pooping pigeons can solidify a nest into a heavy plinth. Johnston found one nest that weighed four and a half pounds and contained several crushed eggs and two “mummified young.” He characterized such structures as “monumental in size and longevity.” We humans have the pyramids, the Arc de Triomphe, and Mount Rushmore; pigeons have piles of sticks and dead babies encased in poop. These pigeon monuments may harbor mite and insect populations, but also discourage the worst ectoparasites, like fleas, Johnston wrote. My notes on Johnston’s nest findings end with an editorial annotation: “glahaahg.”
It’s counterintuitive, but the more repellant tidbits I gathered about pigeons, the more closely I wanted to look. For one thing, I wanted to examine their feet. I’d found so little on mangled feet in the scientific literature that I began to wonder if I was exaggerating the problem. I also wanted to inspect the birds afresh, so that I might see the colors and patterns and behaviors that I had been so astonished to discover. And so, on an Easter Sunday, while many kids were dyeing eggs and eating chocolate, I took my two-year-old daughter on a pigeon expedition. When I had told my plan to my wife, Beth, she blanched. Where exactly, she wanted to know, did I plan on going? “Will you please be sure to keep our daughter away from human feces and needles?” she asked.
It was a reasonable request: Pigeons prefer dense urban settings, and they congregate in open spaces. It’s exactly the same environment favored by the mentally ill, drug addicts, and homeless people. I suspect that some of the disgust we feel for pigeons is associative. We’ve grafted our feelings about human outcasts onto these birds because they share the same spaces and hang around waiting for handouts. Perhaps we’d feel differently about pigeons if we were better at dealing with our own species.
Josephine, however, was delighted to be setting out on the expedition. As we waited for the morning train, I plumbed her knowledge of pigeons.
They are, she told me, “white.”
Okay, any other colors? “Black.”
“What do they do?”
“Fly.” She demonstrated, one pudgy hand flapping a diagonal line from her chest to over her head. That pretty much exhausted her comprehension.
When we emerged at the San Francisco Embarcadero, Josephine got out of her stroller and ran the blocks to the waterfront, past the street artists and knickknack sellers setting up their booths. She’d promised to alert me when she saw her first bird, but she toddled past one bobbing along the concrete, and then another. Finally I knelt and wrapped an arm around her to halt her momentum. Still, she looked past the birds. I extended one arm at her eye level and pointed them out: two healthy-looking creatures strutting between an empty coffee cup and a sheet of newspaper. She drew in a breath, as if we’d spotted a condor.
“What do you see?” I asked, alert for her first, unsullied impressions.
“Pigeons” was her less-than-satisfactory response. What did I expect from a two-year-old? An inspiring quote? An original biological observation? She leaned against my restraining arm, her warm body straining toward movement.
I made one last stab: “What colors?”
“Black and white,” she said matter-of-factly, then added, “and green.”
And there it was: The iridescence of their neck feathers shone green on top, and purple on the undersides of their necks. I’d never registered the greenness of pigeons, and interestingly, none of the formal descriptions I’d read had noted it either. And yet Jo, in her first few seconds of work as a young naturalist, had made this discovery effortlessly. Of course, she wasn’t the first; when I went back to the library I found other descriptions that did mention green. The material of the neck feathers works as a crude mirror, and tiny barbs align in such a way as to cast shimmering light that shifts with movement. Pigeon necks look even more fabulous to pigeons: They see in a broader spectrum of light than people, so in addition to the colors we perceive, pigeons see two additional colors in the ultraviolet wavelengths that we, poor limited beings that we are, will never comprehend.
When Josephine said pigeons were black and white, I assumed she meant black and a color much lighter than black whose name she had forgotten (i.e., gray). But some of the pigeons in the plaza that morning were also splashed with white. When white “doves” are released—such as at a wedding or a grand opening—they are almost always actually king pigeons, a breed with white plumage. These white birds find their way into feral groups, splattering white paint on feathers across the clan for generations.
Beyond iridescence, pigeons have just three feather pigments: black, white, and rusty brown. These are combined in three main wing patterns: bar, which is the classic pigeon look, with an armband on each wing; spread, which is essentially all black; and check, in which black and white form a crazy quilt on the wings. Much more rare are the reds, which are really a hue of light brown. These mix together in infinite combinations.
Pigeon colors are important because the human fascination with the genetic determinants of pigeon plumage underpins the entirety of modern biology. It wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to say that pigeons are responsible for our understanding of evolution—the master theory that governs the modern understanding of life.
Breeders have refined pigeon genetics to preposterous extremes. In her pigeon book, Humphries dreamed up instructions for visualizing some of these fancy show breeds: “Pouter: Squeeze the pigeon from its lower half like toothpaste, until its body is skinny and its breast puffs up. Then pull its legs until they are twice as long as normal pigeon legs. Stand upright. . . . Fantail: Affix a large turkey tail to the back of a pigeon. Because the tail will be too heavy, give the bird an enormous breast to compensate and move its head onto its back.” Another breed, Modenas, are, according to her whimsy, “voluptuous bird pillows.”
The point is that humans have figured out how to mold this species into just about anything. The genetic rules that govern pigeons are complex, but pigeon breeders developed folk knowledge that comprehended recessive characteristics, sex-linked attributes, trait suppression, and other principles long before the time of Gregor Mendel or Charles Darwin. Much of Darwin’s theory of evolution, in fact, comes from observing the techniques of pigeon breeders. Most of the first chapter of On the Origin of Species is about pigeons. His editor actually suggested he chuck the rest and focus on the birds: “Everyone is interested in pigeons,” he told Darwin. It makes a better Hollywood story to say that Darwin’s revelations came as epiphanies in strange lands, but he really made most of his discoveries at home. On the Beagle he made some acute observations of finches, but it wasn’t until Darwin made a close examination of the utterly unexotic pigeons of England that he was able to articulate a detailed mechanism explaining how evolution worked. In a very real way, the folk knowledge of pigeon fanciers is the foundation of our understanding of biology.
Josephine zigzagged through Justin Herman Plaza honing her curb-walking skills and pointing occasionally to a pigeon. I chased after her, bouncing the stroller down steps, then back up again when she circled around. A beautifully ugly fountain—a knot of ragged concrete pipes that are almost always dry—dominates the plaza. Unshaven, smudge-faced men napped on the grass. It’s stark, but it’s surrounded on all sides by postcard-perfect scenery. Along the street stand rows of palm trees, interrupted by the clock tower of the San Francisco Ferry Building. Beyond lies the bay, and on that day dozens of white sailboats ironed the water’s chop. Justin Herman Plaza is a working-class retort (or un-working-class, more properly) to the upper-class waterfront. And of course, that makes it pigeon habitat. Perhaps a dozen loafed atop the pockmarked fountain.
There are people who love pigeons for their association with the downtrodden. The rapper Vast Aire, who casts himself as a pigeon in one of his songs, explained the affinity: “They are at the bottom of the food chain, but they still survive, they still make it.”
Many of the people who regularly feed and cultivate relationships with pigeons are themselves on the fringes of society. They are disconnected from other people due to poverty, limited language skills, or mental illness, but they form deep emotional connections with the birds.
Before pigeons were symbols of poverty, they were gentrified. They were spread around the world by aristocrats. Before we started designing architectural features to repel pigeons, the upper class built nesting places in their houses to invite them in. The French colonial governor of Quebec, Samuel de Champlain, brought pigeons to the New World and had the workmen include a roost in his home. Every city pigeon now scrounging for crumbs is a descendant of these birds cultivated by the gentry.
How does one fall from a position as a symbol of affluence to a symbol of indigence? I suspect that the pigeon’s status is inversely related to its biological success. That is, pigeons could not very well serve as a marker of nobility once they became, well, common. Aristocracy demands exclusivity.
If there weren’t such an abundance of wild pigeons, they might have maintained their social position, because no one was ever able to truly industrialize pigeon farming. Unlike the mass-production-ready chicken, pigeons spend a lot of time nurturing their offspring—the parents nurse the young squabs for three months. That’s why pigeons on the plate retained their exclusivity: They never became a commoner’s meal.
As Europeans spread across North America they left behind a trail of pigeons. By putting up statues and courthouses and laying out public plazas, they created the habitat pigeons needed to multiply. When it became commonplace, the species turned into a humble bird of the people.
We’re left with an incoherent double standard: We despise the bird in its impoverished feral state, but savor it on the menu. Most restaurateurs do their best to help us keep these two versions of the bird separate. However, there is one upscale poultry shop in Amsterdam called Pieter van Meel Groothandel in Wild en Gevogelte that makes pâté from the wild pigeons of the city. One of the shop’s owners, Thomas van Meel, confirmed via e-mail that he makes “game pâté” from urban pigeons, but only after screening the birds for disease. Imagine a world in which we saw pigeons not as objects of disgust, but as a sustainable local food source.
As pigeons were making their descent from bird of the aristocracy to bird of poverty, the native American passenger pigeon was going extinct. The paved habitat that allowed pigeons to spread was replacing the forest habitat that had supported passenger pigeons. We traded a bird of the trees for a bird of the city.
Feral pigeons truly are the people’s bird in that they depend on us, and in a sense, they belong to us. Humans are an essential element in most ecosystems that support pigeons. There are a few wild places, like the coastal cliffs of Sardinia, where populations of pigeons remain, but even those birds forage for seeds from farms. In places abandoned by humans, like the Scottish island of St. Kilda, the pigeons have gone extinct. To idealistic naturalists of the old school, who only value nature when the human touch is undetectable, this dependency makes pigeons uninteresting at best. The original pigeon sin is that they allied themselves with humans as we tried to improve upon Eden. They thrive in our litter-strewn wake. We see our own scrappy, invasive nature reflected in pigeons, and it horrifies us.
Or maybe not. There’s a simpler way to explain the revulsion pigeons provoke than claiming we see our reflection in their beady red eyes. Maybe what really horrifies us about pigeons is that they truly can be fecking disgusting.
In Justin Herman Plaza, after I’d worked up a sweat running around pushing the stroller, I lured Josephine into semistillness by offering to let her feed the pigeons.
“Want to give them some bread?” I asked.
“Huh,” was her affirmative grunt.
A pair of pigeons had landed on the grass nearby and they bobbed forward, murmuring. Josephine took two slices of bread from me and hurled both overhand at the birds. Immediately, there were wings everywhere around us. At least ten pigeons fought for the scraps. A big seagull landed and swallowed the remaining crust whole. Three more seagulls appeared. Other pigeons came fluttering down. I felt my old phobia twinging as the birds edged closer, eyeing us, I thought, remorselessly.
There’s something about swarming that stimulates horror deep within the subterranean unconscious. Alfred Hitchcock understood that this horror was universal enough to fuel The Birds with primal potency. When pigeons proliferate, they also cause more obvious, surface-level problems. An adult pigeon splatters out more than twenty-five pounds of feces a year. Fungi, such as aspergillus, feed on those white stains, and in the process generate acids that eat into statues and other stonework. The damages add up to more than a billion dollars a year in the United States alone, according to one estimate. It’s likely that we spend even more than that on the pigeon-control industry, which installs spikes, netting, and tiny electric fences on buildings.
Daniel Haag-Wackernagel, a biologist at the University of Basel, Switzerland, is the probably the foremost expert on urban pigeons, and he says that none of this amounts to a real solution. Pigeons will endure shocks, fight their way through nets, and mutilate themselves on spikes to get to their homes. “No repellent system we tested can keep a pigeon away if it wants to reach its squabs in the nest,” Haag-Wackernagel wrote; “motivation is simply too strong.” Barriers can work if a building owner kills the squabs and clears out the nests. But even this only relocates the problem. The pigeon-control industry does steady work, pushing the birds along from one customer to the next. It’s analogous (again) to the problem of homelessness: Cities try to solve the problem by hassling the homeless, telling them to move on. As a San Francisco cop once told me, “Every now and then a politician decides to sweep everyone out of one place and into another. And we’re the broom.” The pigeon-control businesses profit with every sweep.
There is another option for bird control: Cities have tried to exterminate pigeons with poison, traps, falcons, and even what Haag-Wackernagel calls a pigeon “electric chair”—essentially, a lethal electrified bird feeder. None of it has worked. For every pigeon that dies, another appears within days. The birds are simply too fecund: They reproduce so quickly that unless we were willing to kill the majority of birds in a city every year, we’d never make a dent.
The number of pigeons that live in a city, it turns out, is not determined by nesting space or by predation, but by the availability of food. After World War II, there was a revolution in agriculture: Munitions factories were retrofitted to produce fertilizer and food became cheap. Food became so abundant that people started throwing a lot of it away, often in places where pigeons could get at it.
Before World War II, pigeons filled their crops in daily flights from their nests in the cities to farms, or to seed-transport stations on the railways. This commute is a thing of the past. Pigeons now eat close to home, avoiding the long risky flight that made them vulnerable to predation by raptors.
No matter how plentiful the food, the population always grows until there are more beaks than crumbs. I watched that principle at work as pigeons fluttered down from perches around the park and gobbled up our bread.
“Papa,” Josephine said plaintively, displaying her empty hands, “they need food.”
The kind of feeding that Josephine was doing, tossing out the occasional crust or sharing a bit of lunch, is not significant enough to make a difference, according to Haag-Wackernagel. The real problem is litter and massive regular feedings. When pigeons can come to a spot day in and day out for a guaranteed meal, their populations explode. And it’s in this population explosion that the true problems arise. Roosting areas become crowded and filthy. Diseases and parasites spread. Birds become more aggressive. Shit splatters everywhere. Anyone who dares to toss out a little bread is immediately engulfed in a tornado of wings.
In 1988 Haag-Wackernagel helped the Swiss city of Basel launch the first truly successful pigeon-control program. The key component of this program was aimed not at pigeons, but at humans. It turned out that just a few individuals were responsible for the lion’s share of feeding. These were mostly elderly, ragged folk for whom pigeon feeding is the central reason for being. They were covertly dumping pounds of grain, sometimes several times a day. “Pigeon feeders are often individuals who have no one to care for. The pigeons play an important role in replacing emotional ties,” Haag-Wackernagel wrote in a report on the project. But it’s not just unfortunate, slightly crazy people. Animal-rights groups and at least one neighborhood organization have reluctantly begun feeding large quantities of grain to pigeons because they feel a moral obligation to prevent the birds from starving. This is ridiculously wrongheaded, according to Haag-Wackernagel, because while feeding pigeons may indeed prevent some from starving, it increases the sum total of pigeon suffering. And so in Basel, Haag-Wackernagel helped authorities launch a campaign to teach the public that feeding pigeons is actually harmful to the species’ population at large.
“We drastically demonstrated the negative effects of feeding, e.g., by pamphlets and posters showing shocking pictures of baby pigeons infected by diseases and parasites,” Haag-Wackernagel wrote in another report. “We tried to explain the complicated relationship between feeding and overcrowding and the density-dependent causes of the poor living conditions.”
All this made me reconsider my proposition that pigeons are innately revolting. It is humanity that has made pigeons disgusting. It is our own filth that has created the conditions that enable pigeon populations to swell to slum densities. In the end, there’s only one way to control pigeons, Haag-Wackernagel, says: We have to control ourselves.
After we’d attracted our first flock of birds, I decided it was probably time to bring the feeding to an end. But this made no sense to Jo. I’d promised to let her feed the pigeons, I still had three-quarters of a slice of bread, and the birds were obviously still interested. They approached, bowing at every step, edging relentlessly forward. Pigeons have mastered a form of interspecies body language. There’s something in the way that they approach that signals clearly to people that they are desperately interested in a snack. This language was crystal clear to my two-year-old: She was still learning the fundamentals of English, but she innately understood pigeon.
“They’re super hungry,” she repeated, imploringly.
We got the hang of feeding the pigeons eventually. The best technique was to let Jo dribble crumbs around my shoes so only the boldest of the birds would venture in, preventing a violent scrum.
The swarm dispersed, and the individuals that remained wandered about with a relieving lack of intensity. We sat on a retaining wall, Josephine’s feet dangling safely above a pair of black check pigeons, which scooted in to peck the bread, then scurried away again. The seagulls, less trusting, eyed us from a safe distance, a yard off.
When we ran out of bread, Jo wandered slowly into the park, following the birds. This time, though, instead of dashing manically, she settled onto her knees and watched. I sat and watched her watching.
A big, presumably male, pigeon had puffed out his neck feathers and was cooing assertively at a slimmer, presumably female, bird. The second bird kept inching away from his advances. I’d seen this scene acted out dozens of times, and I’d always assumed that I was witnessing courtship: a lothario pestering a girl who has no interest in him. But I’d learned that this is actually what’s called driving. The birds were a mated pair, and the male was herding the female back to his own territory, where he wouldn’t have to worry about other males competing for her affection. Courtship is more balanced. The males strut about, occasionally driving the females, bowing, and dragging their tails. But it’s less bullying and insistent. In the end, it’s the female who chooses among the males, and the pair solidifies their bond by feeding each other. The males’ boorishness only becomes apparent after the birds are bonded for life. I wasn’t going to try to convey any of this to Josephine quite yet.
I also did not tell her that, after mating, the male may, in Johnston’s words, “stand tall, and then launch into a display flight,” bringing his wings “smartly” together behind his back, clapping, presumably for himself. After reading this, I began to notice this clapping. Pigeons also clap their wings when straining to lift off vertically, but if it is a single bird making a triumphant ellipse of about a hundred feet and clapping periodically, I know.
An elderly Chinese man appeared from behind the sculpture, near where Jo knelt. He was feeding the pigeons too. I was too far away to understand the words that passed between him and Josephine, but each said something. They shared a moment of recognition, an acknowledgment of a mutual interest. These moments endear pigeons to the sociologist Colin Jerolmack, who appreciates the birds for their ability to bring very different people together. “I found that pigeon-feeding routines could become part of what Jane Jacobs called the ‘intricate sidewalk ballet’ that enriched pedestrians’ experience,” he wrote in his book The Global Pigeon. When people feed pigeons, he noticed, they also frequently strike up conversations with strangers who are doing the same. The opportunity to play with a wild thing provides some common ground for neighbors who may have nothing in common. This kind of casual shared experience is the foundation of friendship and, ultimately, of community. “While the child who takes heed of the birds around her might feel more connected to nature, she might also—or instead—feel more connected to her neighborhood,” Jerolmack wrote.
I might have walked over to say hello myself, but at that moment I noticed two birds just a couple feet away on the retaining wall where I was sitting. Remembering my original mission, I peered at their feet, and indeed, one was missing a toenail (or talon, if you will), while the other had a sort of clubfoot. Both looked perfectly healthy otherwise. My imagination hadn’t been embellishing pigeon deformities after all, or at least not generating them out of thin air. I snapped a few pictures. Then I lured Josephine into her stroller with the promise that we’d get ice cream in the ferry building before we went home.
Feral pigeons are the same species as the birds bred to race, which have sold for more than $300,000 a bird. Those trained for racing can travel at up to 110 miles per hour for hours on end, propelled by massive breast muscles that constitute a third of their weight. Those breast muscles make them a culinary delicacy, and they are regularly served in fine restaurants. They have a mysterious ability to find their way home, no matter what scientists do to confuse them. Pigeons have received the highest military honors after delivering messages through storms of bullets. Pigeon post was the first major endeavor undertaken by one fledgling venture in journalism, which would become Reuters, the world’s largest news-gathering organization. Pigeons mate for life, and can live to the age of twenty.
Perhaps the most remarkable thing about these birds is their ability to find their way home, even when the distances, the navigational challenges, and deadly obstacles are of epic proportions. Homing pigeons are the same species as street pigeons, they have simply been bred and trained for racing. These thoroughbreds are about twice the weight of the average pigeon, and that mass resides mostly in the breast muscles.
Charlie Wolcott is perhaps the person who knows the most about pigeon navigation. He spent much of his scientific career confounded by the birds. He worked by coming up with hypotheses about the mechanism they use to find their way home, and then disabling that mechanism in test birds. If these handicapped birds didn’t make it home, it would prove that he’d found their technique. For example, when Wolcott and his team thought that perhaps the birds were navigating by sight, using landmarks, they fitted them with frosted goggles. The pigeons came home—though many circled aimlessly in the last mile. (Apparently, sight is important in the homestretch.) When they guessed that the birds were using Earth’s magnetic field to find their way, they strapped magnets to them. This had absolutely no effect. But when researchers strapped magnets to birds on a cloudy day, they were completely hornswoggled. This led Wolcott to a partial explanation:
“The pigeon uses [the] sun as a compass if it’s a sunny day; if it’s an overcast day, it switches and uses the earth’s magnetic field as its compass.”
Problem solved, right? Unfortunately, Wolcott said, finding the birds’ compass was only half the solution. If you were dropped in the middle of the wilderness with a compass, which way would you go to get home? You would know which way was north, but you would have no idea if you were north of your home. So, in addition to a compass, you’d need a map. And with pigeons, the map remains utterly mysterious.
“There are at least three theories,” Wolcott said. “One is smell, and the Italians, appropriately, are great partisans of the olfactory hypothesis.”
The idea is that the pigeons are mapping the sequence of smells as their handlers drive them out for a flight: “On the way to the release point you smell the odors as you go along, you pass olives, and then garlic, and then chocolate, the pines of Rome! You remember the sequence and they just go backwards,” he said.
Then there’s an idea that the birds are paying attention to the variations in magnetism, and they use these fluxes to build a map. So, odor and magnetism are the first two hypotheses: “The third is infrasound, very-low-frequency sound. Pigeons are sensitive to sounds down to one-tenth of one cycle per second. We [humans] quit at about twenty cycles per second. So pigeons are listening to these very low frequencies for reasons that we haven’t a clue [about].”
But birds have made it home even after scientists disrupted their sense of smell, or messed with the magnetism, or interfered with their hearing. Scientists have anesthetized the birds, and put them on rotating turntables in airtight chambers, and driven them to the release site. “Oh yes, yes,” Wolcott said. “We’ve done that. It doesn’t bother them. The wretched creatures have several mechanisms, and when you take one away the little stinkers switch to something else,” Wolcott said.
In his research Wolcott played the role of a James Bond villain, setting up impossible challenges, and inevitably the pigeons would dodge the alligators and flaming spikes without wrinkling their dinner jackets.
Pigeons have also, of course, played the role of unflappable government agents in real life. All those sensitive homing tools have allowed humans to put pigeons to use as instruments of communication, and they were particularly useful in war.
The most famous war pigeon is probably Cher Ami, who was trapped behind German lines with an American division during World War I. Back on the front lines, the US artillery, which had no clue the division was out there, was lobbing explosive shells onto American soldiers. The communications specialist for the trapped division released two pigeons. The Germans promptly shot them down. Then the Americans released Cher Ami, their last hope. Here’s how Rose Wilder Lane embellished the drama of that moment in 1919 for the Ladies’ Home Journal:
Flung upward, . . . into stinging, blinding pain. For hardly had his wings taken hold of the air when agony struck him, stopped him, pierced him through and through. He fluttered and fell, fluttered, caught at the air and reeled. “God!” said the haggard man in the shell hole below. “He’s done for.”
Convulsively the strong wings struck out again. Then they steadied and held the air. Cher Ami wavered, rose and wavered again. Then he vanished above the smoke. There was clear air around him. Beneath him was such a world as he had never seen, a hideous world without meaning or purpose. Only his wings were the wings he had known, and they carried him around and around, in weary circles.
As he circled he heard a silent voice, a voice without words, that said: “Come!” “Come!” said the wordless message. “This is the right way. Follow it. Come!”
Every telling of this story I’ve read suffers from the same overindulgence in artistic license. It’s just so potently heroic that writers can’t help adding flourishes. Cher Ami made it back to the base in half an hour, but arrived missing an eye, and (aha!) a foot: The message canister on its leg was hanging by a few ligaments. But that was enough to save the soldiers. After Cher Ami died, a taxidermist preserved the body, and in doing so he found that Cher Ami was actually female—a transgender war hero. She’s now at the Smithsonian. Cher Ami is pretty scruffy. On the street, she would be indistinguishable from any other one-legged pigeon. Now that we no longer have a use for these birds, they’re considered bums. They’re not so different from the grimy man carrying a piece of cardboard on which he’s blocked out the words VETERAN, ANYTHING HELPS.
Carrier pigeons have gone out of fashion in the era of high-speed communication, but they may rise again. The Chinese military has trained ten thousand birds as a low-tech alternative in case their advanced communications technology is subverted or destroyed.
The mystery of mangled pigeon feet was maddeningly elusive. But finally, Haag-Wackernagle was able to supply a satisfying answer. I sent him the article that ran in The Stranger, which, he said, “contains a lot of nonsense but also the real reason: human hairs, fishing line, and other filaments get entangled, blood circulation stops, and necrosis leads to the loss of toes.” Other birds don’t have the same problem because they are better at removing hair with their beaks, whereas pigeons seem unable to rid themselves of the filaments. In addition, other birds hop while pigeons walk. Pigeons shuffle along in a way that makes them more likely to pick up strings than a skipping sparrow. The explanation is, in the end, quite simple, he said. Still, there is no end to speculation: “In Germany people believed that a mysterious person would hogtie pigeons,” he said.
Everyone who studies pigeons long enough seems to gain some affection for them, and I was no different. To Johnston and Janiga they are a “masterpiece.” Haag-Wackernagle wrote a richly illustrated coffee-table book documenting their natural history and the roles they have played in art and religion. At the end of my conversation with Wolcott, I asked him if there was anything else I should be thinking about, and he delivered a lovely little soliloquy on the strange alien world he has been able to glimpse by watching pigeons:
“One of the things we all naively assume about animals is that they live in the same world that we do, and they see things the way we do. And it’s very clear pigeons are not like that. For example, they are exquisitely sensitive to changes in [atmospheric] pressure. They can tell the difference between the floor and the ceiling in the room I’m sitting in—maybe eight feet of vertical displacement. We can feel it in our ears when we go in an elevator up these big skyscrapers, but we’re amateurs compared to your average street pigeon. They can hear down to these very low frequencies. Pigeons have the ability to see in the ultraviolet, which we do not. Pigeons have the ability to sense, somehow, Earth’s magnetic field. Pigeons can detect the plane of polarized light, something we have real trouble doing. Those are just some of the things that come to mind. So they live in a very different world, in a way. It’s fun to think about what that world an animal inhabits is like, and what kind of information it’s getting there, and why it matters.”
Want to open the doors of perception? You could experiment with psychedelics, or you could look to that underappreciated portal to extrasensory awareness: the pigeon. When I first started thinking about pigeons I saw only filth and pestilence. But what I was really seeing was human failings—poverty, waste, and our refusal to stop feeding these birds while shirking all the other responsibilities that come with domestication. But thanks to Wolcott I can now see them as antennae picking up signals beyond our ken. They are war heroes to me now, champion racers and devoted parents. It was disgust that drove me to pigeons, but I feel true affection for them now.