Do you know any pigeon-haters, or pigeon-phobes? Pigeons are actually such interesting birds, and they mean us no harm at all. Bring some wonder into your next city or suburban outing, and maybe you’ll see pigeons in a new light.
I could say so much more about them — but I’ve only got nine minutes!
(Not my best-quality audio, I’m afraid, but this will have to do because I’ve already recorded it twice!)
Listen on Podbean:
Listen on YouTube:
A few resources:
Are pigeons as smart as primates? You can count on it.
The human relationship with pigeons: forgotten war heroes
Humans domesticated pigeons, then abandoned them. Is it time for a reappraisal?
Pigeon audio clip: BBC Sound Effects
Music: Jens East — Daybreak (ft. Henk) www.soundcloud.com/jenseast
Licence: Creative Commons Attribution V4.0
Transcription (remember, this is a direct transcription of what I said and is not actually how I write!):
Welcome to 9 Minutes of Wonder. I’m Betsy Hedberg. I hope this podcast will help you rekindle your sense of wonder for this awe-inspiring world. If you like what you hear in the next few minutes, please subscribe and share.
Hey everyone, hope you’re doing well. Let’s talk about pigeons.
You probably have pigeons where you live. And I certainly do. I see a lot of them. I’ve always lived in places that have pigeons.
So first you’re like, pigeons…why? They’re just these everyday birds.
But that’s the point, because as you probably know if you’ve been listening to me, I like to think about how the seemingly mundane things that are all around me when I go outside are actually full of stories and are actually really fascinating. Sometimes looking at something mundane and ordinary can actually take me out of my present-moment busyness, and it can help me feel more creative too. And if it can do that for me, it can do that for you. So that’s why we’re talking about pigeons today.
I have a neighbor across the street who every day around noon goes out with some bread and drops the bread down from her balcony one story to the ground. And the pigeons go crazy, they love it. And they even wait for her on a lamppost. And then she looks around, and she looks for them and they look for her, and then they fly down and they enjoy this bread.
Now I’ve realized that you may regard pigeons as a commonplace bird, even a nuisance bird, and you may actually hate them. I know people who do, and I see people acting like they hate them all the time. But I think if you learn about them and if you take a closer look at them and consider their background, you can realize how fascinating they are.
So let’s give it a try. The birds that we commonly call pigeons are descendants of rock doves. So the words pigeon and dove are actually used kind of interchangeably. This type of bird lives everywhere on Earth except for in the driest deserts and the northernmost Arctic regions. And they don’t live in Antarctica, which is also a desert.
All pigeons in North America are descendants of imported European pigeons who came there mainly in the 17th century.
Pigeons mate for life, although sometimes the boys cheat. And when they raise their babies, for the first few days they give them some milk that they have produced in their crops in this part of their neck. And they’re birds, not mammals, but it’s from the same chemical as mammalian milk.
Did you know that pigeons are super smart? They can actually count. And in at least one study, pigeons counted as well as rhesus monkeys, which, as you may know, are pretty closely related, all things considered, to us. So pigeons can count not as well as we can, but pretty well.
And pigeons have been found to multitask better than people. You might say, “Well, that’s not saying much, because people actually can’t multitask. We think we can, but we can’t.” And yeah, that’s true, but pigeons have very densely packed nerve cells in their brains, in those little brains. So they’re smart, and studies have shown that they can multitask.
Now pigeons, or at least baby pigeons, are also very gentle birds. I have been lucky enough to get to feed baby pigeons at a bird rescue center where I used to volunteer, and they were really sweet. I would have like five baby pigeons who were orphaned and brought into the center, and I had to feed them. And the way that we did that was we put birdseed into our hands and made a cup with our hands, or we kind of closed the fist gently, so there was an opening into my fist. And then the baby pigeons would take their entire head and put it inside of my cupped hand, and they would eat and eat. And five pigeons would try and do this all at the same time, and somehow it worked out fine, and they seemed to get enough birdseed. And it was kind of a really pleasant thing to do. So pigeons have nice babies.
Pigeons also have incredible homing instincts, which you may have heard about, thanks to magnetic perception abilities in their brains, excellent vision, and their intelligence, which we’ve already touched on. And that intelligence allows them to learn how to get back home.
So the next time you go out and see pigeons in your community, maybe looking out your window right now, think about some of these incredible features of the pigeon body and mind.
You can also think about how pigeons have a rich history. Now, of course, pigeons have their own evolution and their own natural history, but they also have a very interesting history of interactions with people. And of course pigeons didn’t get to choose how they interacted with people, and people have not always treated pigeons kindly, to say the least. But if we take a look at some of the ways pigeons have interacted with people in the past, I think it’s pretty interesting.
So here are a few examples.
The rock dove, or the bird that we know as the domestic pigeon, is the oldest domesticated bird that there is, and their domestication dates back as early as 10,000 years ago. Their pictures can be found in Mesopotamian cuneiform — the writing — and also in Egyptian hieroglyphics.
Pigeons have also been used to carry messages for a long time. For example, the ancient Greeks used pigeons to send the results of the Olympic Games from town to town, and the Romans sent pigeons to report the results of chariot races. Genghis Khan created a pigeon-based communication network, which was so much easier than having his people travel over the extremely rugged terrain of Central Asia on foot. They would just send a pigeon with a little message on — but then I’m not actually sure where. I assume they’re putting the message, like tying the message to the pigeon’s foot, but I’m not actually sure about that.
Pigeons were also used in both world wars of the 20th century to carry messages. For example, in World War I, the U.S. Army Signal Corps had 600 pigeons who helped it relay messages. One of those pigeons was named Cher Ami, or Dear Friend, and he flew 12 important missions and is credited with saving more than 200 lives in one mission during World War I. He did such a good job that he was awarded the Croix de Guerre from the French government, which is the big fancy military award for being a war hero, not generally awarded to animals, let alone pigeons.
Another pigeon story that you may have heard about, which is pretty sad, is the story of the North American passenger pigeon. These birds used to fly in enormous flocks throughout North America, I mean billions and billions of birds, and they were the most abundant bird on the entire continent. And they were fast too. They could fly up to 100 kilometers per hour. The Native Americans did hunt them, but — surprise — the Europeans were the ones who came and rapidly brought their demise, like they did with people and other animals, as you probably know. But they used the meat of the passenger pigeons as cheap food, and they hunted them to such an extreme measure that, along with habitat destruction, with the settlement of the North American continent, the passenger pigeon population started to decline very rapidly in the late 19th century.
The last passenger pigeon in the wild was shot in 1901, and the last one in captivity, named Martha, died at the Cincinnati Zoo in 1914. So the passenger pigeon is extinct.
Now that you have some new perspectives on pigeons in the here and now and know some things about their interesting history, maybe you’d wonder, like, what do pigeons mean for the future? And really, I can’t answer that question. I don’t know what pigeons mean for the future, and I don’t know what their future holds, of course.
But I will invite you to think about this. Someone sitting in the room that I’m sitting in right now, looking out the window 100 years from now, is likely to see a pigeon that is the great — but then you have to say great 200 times — grandchild of the pigeon that I’m looking at right now on the lamppost outside of my office window. I think that’s pretty cool. Maybe you do too. 100 years from now, 200 generations of pigeons, a few generations of people.
So again, I hope you’ll be able to see these everyday birds in a new way from now on. And I hope that looking at them can give you at least a moment of wonder and a moment of joy as you go about your day in the city or suburbs or wherever you live. And I look forward to talking with you next time about another hopefully wonder-inspiring topic.