Columba Livia Domestica

 

Columba Livia Domestica 

Tanner Clegg 

 Its head is radically spherical, almost to a fault, and its neck feathers do this cool green/purple iridescent thing when they comingle with sunlight. It nests alongside the emulsifying chemical compounds of rotten bridges and plywood-plastered apartment complexes, and it grazes in the upper strata of garbage cans, relishing your escapee fries at the bottom of the bag. Some say that it is nothing new and nothing special, that it is impolite and klutzy and gratuitously persistent and generally annoying. Others gleefully offer up heads, thighs, and wrists as landing pads. 

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 The global aviary is absolutely stacked with gawk-inspiring birds. 

 The mourning dove, with its soft and tan feathers and its ghostly and rhythmic coo, soars with the aplomb of divine metaphor—“And behold, the Holy Ghost descended like a dove”—carrying with it promises of peace and pleasantness. The bald eagle, with its E. PLURIBUS UNUM banner fastened between maxilla and mandible, carries a leafy olive branch in its right clutch of talons and a fleet of arrows in its left. Flamingos, whose plumages are as otherworldly as their default sleep position, are bona fide harbingers of warmth, as are the north-floating Vs of geese and ducks and other migratory waterfowl. Certain parrot species can command 1,000-word vocabularies, and crows and magpies score better than you’d think on self-awareness tests. 

 Not to be outdone by its feathered peers, the pigeon, or “rock dove,” sports several impressive features of its own. Most notably, the creature comes equipped with an in-flight GPS device whose machinations have baffled scientists and enthralled fanciers (folks who keep and breed pigeons are literally called ‘pigeon fanciers’) for hundreds of years. This ‘homing instinct,’ which enables wayward pigeons to return to their home lofts, bridges, coops, caves, and crannies with chilling accuracy, has been scrutinized by curious scientists seeking to understand the pigeon’s spatial-orientation processes. Studies demonstrate that pigeons use a combination of methods to find their way home, including magnetoreception (pigeons have iron particles in their beaks), visual mapping, scents, sounds, and sun angle analysis. When scientists deprive pigeons of these senses for control group purposes, the birds often make it home anyway, suggesting an incomplete scientific understanding of pigeons’ homing instincts. 

 Once, a pigeon owned by the Duke of Wellington was set loose on Ichaboe Island, a small, arid blip just west of Namibia’s Diamond Coast. Fifty-five days, 7,200 miles, 12 modern countries (this is a conservative estimate: if the bird stuck to the African coastline rather than cutting up through modern Niger and Algeria, we’re talking 24 countries), and one crossing of hemispheres later, the bird’s corpse was discovered in a south London gutter, just one mile from home. 

Due to these profound ‘homing instincts’ and its meat, the pigeon—one of humanity’s first domesticated animals—is one of history’s most culturally (and economically and geostrategically) significant birds, and has been for quite some time. Bronze Age sculptors in Mesopotamia associated pigeons with holiness and fertility, fashioning representations of the bird to the outstretched arms of terracotta goddess figurines. Ancient shrines of the Fertile Crescent are likewise adorned with engraved pigeons, suggesting that the bird had attained religious significance within Sumerian cultures. In the mid-19th century, a team of archeologists working in northern Iraq found a series of cuneiform texts while excavating the library of King Ashurbanipal, the last great king of ancient Assyria. The texts contained fragments of what would become The Epic of Gilgamesh, a spliced conglomeration of poetic stories whose earliest authors lived in the days of Sumerian city-states (~2100 B.C.). The Epic, which is the world’s oldest known piece of literary fiction, features a globe-smothering flood story similar to that of its biblical counterpart, but in lieu of Noah’s investigative dove, a communicative pigeon plays a central character. Some biblical literalists, for their part, have admitted that Noah’s dove was likely a homing pigeon—the original Hebrew word יוֹנִים, or ‘yonah,’ can be used to signify both ‘turtledove’ and ‘pigeon,’ and turtledoves don’t have the pigeon’s homing instinct. 

The cultural significance of the pigeon isn’t exclusive to ancient Mesopotamia. Ancient Greeks used pigeons to broadcast the results of the Olympic Games, Ramses II announced his Pharaohship to fellow Egyptians through a team of pigeons, and seafaring Phoenician merchants utilized pigeons in marketing strategies, sending them over the taffrails of ships and into coastal Mediterranean cities with ready-to-drop advertisements in foot. Cyrus, the king of 6th century BC Persia, used pigeons to distribute announcements throughout the empire, and, during the Franco-Prussian War, Parisians used pigeons to send messages out of their besieged city, causing invading Prussians to sic hawks on the carrier birds. 

 In 1850 Paul Julius Reuter, founder of Reuters, used a flock of 45 pigeons to carry news between Brussels and Aachen—the birds’ delivery speed was three times faster than that of the railroad. Nine years later, and across the English Channel, Charles Darwin was pointing toward pigeons to illustrate his theory of natural selection. In chapter 1 of On the Origin of Species, before his now-infamous depictions of Galapagos finches and tortoises, Darwin writes of the British aristocracy’s bourgeois pigeon breeds in all their floppy, busty, and ostentatious configurations, noting that this propulsion of passerine variety emanating from a single species—the rock dove, or pigeon—is evidence that species aren’t static or primordial, and that selective pressures (be they ‘natural’ or ‘unnatural’) inform morphological characteristics. 

 Pigeons were also an important source of sustenance for many cultures, which is likely why the birds were domesticated in the first place. Pigeon meat, known as “squab,” was tasty enough to inspire colonists to bring the domesticated Mediterranean bird to the Americas. Squab was a major component of Americans’ diets until the early 20th century, when commercial chicken meat supplanted the pigeon’s dinner plate hegemony. 

The birds played an influential role in World Wars I and II, carrying sensitive intelligence from the bullet-thrumming battlefield back to analysts behind the lines. Recognized for their bravery, 32 WWII pigeons were awarded the Dickin Medal, a bronze medallion emblazoned with the words FOR GALLANTRY: WE ALSO SERVE. Cher Ami, a pedigreed British pigeon recruited by US Army Signal Corps during WWI, was awarded the prestigious Croix de Guerre medal, typically reserved for valorous French soldiers. When US Major Charles White Whittlesey’s division of 550 soldiers was being devastated by a salvo of friendly fire, Cher Ami was dispatched behind enemy lines to carry an important message back to central command: “We are along the road paralell (sic) to 276.4. Our own artillery is dropping a barrage directly on us. For heavens (sic) sake stop it.” Cher Ami immediately found himself locked in German crosshairs as he dutifully rose up and out of the bushes concealing the cornered division, and a barrage of black powder-powered bullets sent him, wings crumpled, to the ground. Miraculously, the pigeon mustered enough strength to take flight again, and when he glided into the division headquarters he had a hole in his breast, an incapacitated eye, and a nearly-detached leg, dangling by a tendon. Cher Ami’s message saved hundreds of lives, and his stuffed body is currently on display at the Smithsonian. 

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The pigeon’s instrumental and centuries-spanning repertoire hasn’t saved it from public vitriol. Because its wings have been replaced by advanced telecommunications technology, and its squab by chicken breasts from factory farms, the contemporary feral pigeon is widely perceived as a food-stealing nuisance, a vector of disease, a “sky rat.” 

In How Pigeons Became Rats: The Cultural-Spatial Logic of Problem Animals, Colin Jerolmack assembles and analyzes a database of pigeon-referencing articles published in American national media across the 20th century. A series of New York Times articles and letters published through mid-20th century reflected the what Jerolmack calls “a growing discursive antipathy toward pigeons,” with authors explaining that the pigeon is “entirely out of place [in the city],” authors recommending the “wringing [of] their pretty little necks,” authors falsely citing pigeons as the progenitors of various diseases, and authors reporting stories of local efforts to use strychnine to kill pigeons en masse. For Jerolmack, many of our collective negative perceptions of pigeons are underpinned by a general mid-20th century shift in opinion vis-à-vis the bird, reflected (and driven) by the dynamics of mass media.

The pigeon remains a polarizing bird today. For many, it is a symbol of dirtiness, disease, and dilapidation. Like rats, mice, other urban evolvees, pigeons feel like some kind of categorical mishap—they’re too wild for the beer garden floor, but too mild to reasonably be called ‘wildlife.’ If the trash-prospecting pigeon in Times Square is out of place, so is the pigeon flitting through the maple forests of the Catskills. 

But pigeons aren’t the only domesticated animal species to become economically obsolete after a season of heavy utilization. Indeed, horses fall into this category; after playing an integral social and economic role for hundreds of years, Henry Ford found a way to stuff twenty of them into a T-model engine. Today, the engine in my dainty Nissan Sentra apparently wields the power of 130 horses. 

But the horse didn’t lose its cultural value when it ceased being the dominant mode of long-distance transportation. People, rather, re-imagined their relationship with the species. Horseback riding, for example, is a popular form of recreation in the US, and the horse racing sector still generates billions of dollars annually. Some people keep horses as pets, and a rodeo is incomplete without a few dozen of them. Even feral horses are lauded as an icon of beauty, strength, and freedom. 

A similar relationship reconceptualization has been occurring between humans and pigeons. Karen Clifton, Executive Director of the American Racing Pigeon Union (AU), thinks pigeon husbandry provides American families with a plethora of benefits. “It keeps kids off their tablets,” she tells me over the phone. “It really helps people connect with nature, and it’s something the entire family can do together.” 

The AU, headquartered in Oklahoma City, is the US’s biggest pigeon racing organization, maintaining a patchwork of 700 clubs across the country. It trains and educates neophyte racers, coordinates and monitors races, lobbies for pro-pigeon racing legislation, and facilitates intra-organization elections. Clifton tells me that the organization currently has about 8,500 members, up from 6,900 in 1999. 

Clifton tells me how racing pigeons are created. After six weeks in the loft, fledged chicks are permitted to flap around the yard, allowing them to identify landmarks and exercise their incipient homing instincts. As weeks pass, the birds slowly fly further and further from the loft, familiarizing themselves with surrounding landmarks while “fine tuning,” as Clifton puts it, their homing sensibilities. Racers then begin physically driving their pigeons further from the loft, expanding the birds’ racing range. “Some of our members feel like 25 miles is sufficient. Others prefer to train them out to 100 plus,” she tells me. Importantly, the birds never fed before they venture out of the loft. “Food,” Clifton explains, “is in large part a motivator to bring them back in [to the loft] in a timely fashion. This is obviously important for racing, but our members also don’t want their birds out hanging around on their neighbors’ houses. They want to be good neighbors.” 

I ask Clifton to walk me through the mechanics of a pigeon race. First, she tells me, the clubs get together to iron out the specifics of their ‘racing season.’ Racing seasons are usually 6 to 8 weeks, with weekly races that tend to crescendo in length. The first race of the series is usually around 95 miles long, and the last can run up to 500 or 600. Before the first race, pigeons are fitted with RFID-embedded leg bands, enabling race monitors to track speeds and declare winners. On the day of a race, a “liberator,” as they’re typically called, will collect all participating pigeons in the race jurisdiction and drive them to the predetermined “release point” in the darkness of early morning. The liberator “liberates” when it becomes light enough to see, and the birds flap like mad until they arrive at their respective lofts, which are equipped with a “scanning pad” that registers their arrival time—“it’s just like scanning groceries”—and sends flight data from the RFID to a central “module” that calculates each racing pigeon’s average yards per minute (YPM) throughout the flight. The bird with the fastest YPM wins. 

“Is there anything you’d like the general public to know about pigeon racing?” I ask. 

“This a hobby that children can use to enhance their learning, and it’s certainly something an entire family can do in a backyard. It’s also an activity for seniors in their golden years. So there’s a benefit to anyone, any age that wants to try to get involved in pigeons. I think most people truly enjoy it when they do get involved.” 

The sport isn’t without its drama. A pigeon doping scandal in Belgium destabilized the world of pigeon racing when traces of painkillers and cocaine were found in the fecal samples of six racing pigeons. In Taiwan, an organized crime group kidnapped expensive racing pigeons for ransom money. 

Perhaps more importantly, pigeon racing has attracted a number of detractors. The BBC’s Roger Harrabin writes that the training programs of pigeon fanciers in the UK are “a bit like an Olympic training camp. Only the athletes are pigeons.” In 2013, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) released report that claims the sport is fundamentally deleterious to the wellbeing of racing pigeons. Three main ethical issues are raised. First, the report claims that breeders of racing pigeons often cull birds that don’t fare well in the genetic lottery (this claim has been contested by Stewart Warthop, manager of the UK’s Royal Pigeon Racing Association, who said, “There are 43,000 registered pigeon fanciers. In 43,000 individuals, there will be people who do silly and stupid things but the vast majority of pigeon fanciers look after and take care of their animals – why wouldn’t they?”). Second, racing pigeons don’t always make it back to the loft; indeed, many get lost, and some even die on the way. According to this argument, pigeon racing accepts a certain level of collateral damage—losing a pigeon or two along the way is an inexorable price of entry. Third, the authors of the report argue that the birds’ monogamous mating arrangements are leveraged against them in racing formats. Pigeons tend to pair bond for life, maintaining an egalitarian distribution of parental duties (both sexes produce milk in their throats, for example). These pair bonding dynamics bode well for racing times; the separated mate wants to fly back quickly to its anxious partner. But occasionally the racer doesn’t make it back to the loft, leaving its mate widowed. 

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The spigots in the clouds have shut off the water pressure, and all that’s left is a languid leak resembling the post-shower drip of poorly-installed showerheads. The air is cold and vapor-y and the ground, its absorbent capacity fully exhausted, is wet and unwilling to compromise and the pigeons, their bodies designed to live in placid Mediterranean climates, are probably also cold which is probably why I’m not seeing them skittering around the White House-flanking Lafayette Square, which is currently a 30,000 m2 puddle. Undeterred (but nevertheless a bit bummed that I chose a cold, post-rainstorm evening to go pigeon watching), I exit the Square and trundle northeastward on Vermont, my soaked shoes exfoliating foamy fizzles of water with each step. 

I approach the entrance of the McPherson Square metro station, which appears to have been created by a giant miter saw whose operator cut a sizable ground-level chunk out of the acute, northeast corner of the US Department of Veteran Affairs building. The concave nature of the escalator-guarding overhang makes the nook a nice place to wait out a rainstorm, and, as one might guess, I spy a nice mix of humans and pigeons milling around inside. As I pull out my notebook my wan, weather-miming face transforms into something florid—this is what I came for. 

I focus my attention on a jittery pigeon whose wings are patterned with what looks like a scale model of outer space; decisively dark, and bespeckled with colorful stars. The bird is pecking around at the foot of an aluminum fence, and each perchworthy crook in the metal crosshatching is guarded by a clump of upward-pointing needles. The pigeon, defiant and bold, flutters up and lights on the only crook without prophylactic needles. 

As soon as the clouds have wrung every last drop of rain from their billowy appendages, the pigeons seem to respond to some kind of ultrasonic pigeon call by unanimously flushing up and out of the entrance of the McPherson Square metro station, aiming their beaks toward General James B. McPherson’s statue across the street. The pigeon with space wings follows. I follow. 

The streets are silent as I slip into innards of McPherson Square, and there are only three things going on: first, the mallard ducks, who are loving how the rain has turned grassy areas into mini swamps, propelling bugs and worms upward and into the range of yellow bills. Second, the sparrows, who aren’t big enough to negotiate with the omnipresent wetness and seem to be uncharacteristically sluggish and uninterested. Third, the pigeons, who are right at home on top of General McPherson’s greening statue.

As I stand at the base of General McPherson’s equestrienne majesty, watching pigeons shit on the arched neck of his horse, I notice an old man, his white beard bouncing a foot below his chin, rolling into the Square on an old bike. Each handlebar is holding a web of white grocery bags. 

He gingerly dismounts and sinks into a bench, pulling five or six plastic bags from the bike. While this happens, I feel the Square’s center of gravity shift. General McPherson has been reduced to ‘some James on some horse,’ and every bird in a 300-foot radius is heading towards the bearded bike man. A pigeon lights on the man’s black beanie. We make eye contact, we smile, I approach, and while I approach the pigeon perched on the man’s head stays put. 

Paul has been feeding the birds at McPherson square for over five years. The ducks are the most aggressive, the sparrows are the second-most aggressive, and the pigeons are the least aggressive, he tells me. Paul has the longest eyebrow hair I’ve ever seen, and he speaks in a low and steady voice. His plastic bags contain different types of leftover food for different types of hungry animals—bread for the ducks, crackers for the pigeons, peanut butter for the squirrels, and ham for the calico alley cats (“they’re real calico kittens, I’m telling you”)—and his pant thighs are so thoroughly suffused with the traffic of bird feet that I can’t tell what color they’re supposed to be. 

The head-perching pigeon hops down to Paul’s thigh, and another pigeon flitters up to his bicycle seat. Enough bread has gone out to the ducks, Paul tells me, so he ignores their nagging gestures (I literally see the fleshy pink of Paul’s fingers disappearing into the yellow bills of biting mallards as they vie for his attention) until they begrudgingly walk away. We watch their tufts of black tail curls bounce as they waddle away, guessing their ages. 

“Once, I was feeding the birds over there”—Paul points toward the sidewalk on the other side of I street—“and two ducks come running from across the street to get some food and got hit by a car. It was terrible. I never fed birds over there again; I’m more careful now.” He uses his right pinky finger to scratch the head of the pigeon on his thigh while his left pointer finger points to a specific duck bedded down in the grass. “That one there has a broken leg. It can fly, but it has a hard time gettin’ around once it’s on the ground. I feel so sorry for that duck.” 

The pigeons, who are deemed “most empathetic” of the bird species by Paul, seem to be his favorite—though he would never divulge such to me. I ask him where he thinks they go at night, and he tells me that they probably roost on the ledges of internally-heated buildings, taking advantage of their warm façades. 

“Does the heat really make its way to the exterior of buildings?” 

“You bet'cha.” 

The rain begins falling again. Paul doesn't seem to notice.

A third pigeon jumps up on the bench to peck at one of Paul’s tupperware containers. “You hungry, little guy?” he asks. He pops the lid, grabs a wad of bread, and hand-feeds the bird with delicacy. 

The downpour is letting my notebook have it. I don’t put it away, though—I weave my pen tip around the droplets materializing on the page, forming letters and words in the few remaining dry pockets. 

“Why do you hold the bread while it eats?” I ask. “You could just drop it, right?” 

Well, you see, the pigeons are my friends.”