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Feral pigeons are often regarded as the vermin of the city streets. But are they more than they seem to the human eye?
Any seasoned British city-dweller is familiar with the swagger of the feral pigeon. As ubiquitous as sodium street lamps and empty crisp packets left abandoned in the gutter, our drab urban cohabitants are so familiar as to be almost indistinguishable from the gum-encrusted pavements that guide us about our lives. Often found strolling nonchalantly through city detritus, your average pigeon is nothing remarkable to the naked eye; yet, when they shuffle their oily feathers, they offer a tantalising glimpse at their iridescent crops, shimmering with the forgone glamour of a vintage movie darling. The scraggly confidence with which the bird conducts itself suggests a hidden cache of street smarts at odds with its bumbling commonality.
Pigeons have always seemed to be eminently at home among the grimy cement effigies and leaden grey skies of London. I keenly recall spending many of my teenage hours observing their activities from a distance, whether in the back garden or while queuing for physics on the third floor of my dull school building. Level with the bridge connecting either side of the block, I had full view of the bustle of birds clustered together in the metallic grooves of the roof, puffed up against the cold and complaining like a disgruntled gaggle of uncles waiting for the bus to the pub on a chilly November afternoon.
Perhaps this penchant for the concrete elements of the city is unsurprising. The mosaic of city pigeons are all variants of the rock dove (Columba livia), which makes its home in stone formations and cliff formations, near-perfectly translating to the boxiness of urban architecture. As trees are the domain of the sparrow, tit, or starling, the office block is the territory of the dove. Ever the guano-defecating menace of cleanliness, efforts have been made to repel pigeons from the urban landscape - first by erecting anti-perching spikes on the ledges of roofs and windows, before progressing to the branches of inner-city trees. Attempting to separate and sterilise our environments this way is not only arrogant, but futile. Surprisingly savvy and adaptable, anti-pigeon architecture does little to permanently deter pigeons - either by apathy or some deeply-rooted insurrectionary drive, the intrusions are frequently vandalised or repurposed, ironically, to support their nests in the spring and summer.
Pigeons are regarded with remarkably little reverence. At best, they’re endearingly mucky, with grubby charm to compensate for their deficits in hygiene and intelligence; at worse, they’re “rats with wings”, horsemen of pestilence no higher in the cultural hierarchy than medieval plague carriers. The belief that pigeons disproportionately spread disease is apocryphal; while you still shouldn’t be handling an unwashed feral pigeon bare-handed, studies carried out in the USA during the 1983-34 bird flu epidemic clearly suggested that neither pigeons nor their faeces were significant vectors, results which were confirmed by subsequent studies in 1996 and 2003. There have also been no recorded cases of zoonotic transmission1 of bird flu to humans in the UK, rendering the pigeon paranoia virtually foundless. Despite their reputation as disease carriers, you’re more likely to catch your death in a secondary school bathroom than among a flock of rock doves.
Challenging the birdbrained image of the pigeon requires us to reassess their cognitive skills and abilities. Unfortunately, there’s no beating around the bush with this one: a pigeon’s forebrain has only half the number of neurones as a crow, and it shows. Charismatic but clumsy, rock doves have been known to accidentally trample their squabs (baby pigeons)2to death, or, in some instances, chuck them out of the nest and to the mercy of nature. These nests, too, are notoriously poorly constructed. It would be easy to declare the pigeon a lost cause, their inner lives as blank as their dark, gormless stares.
But the problems with quantifying intelligence this way are obvious - even the doomed dodo was only driven to extinction by hungry sailors and their pets. Pigeons have remarkable cognitive qualities in areas such as pattern recognition and navigation. Some pigeons are better than professionals at solving certain statistical problems, with an intuitive grasp on empirical probability that puts them at an advantage when engaging in Columba-scale models of late night game shows. Put simply, if you were put in a room with a pigeon and asked to solve the Monty Hall Dilemma,3 you would be left sobbing in the dust. Not every pigeon has a Bachelor’s degree from the Department of Mathematics at Oxford, but people who do should probably feel a little less secure in their footing whenever they encounter one. Pigeons are also remarkably good at making visual distinctions between objects - another series of studies confirmed their ability to distinguish between photographs containing humans and photographs which do not. More tantalising is their ability to distinguish between arbitrary visual stimuli; when put to the test, a pigeon can differentiate between the artistic styles of Monet and Van Gogh, suggesting a high level of pattern recognition.
It can be easy to forget that modern pigeons still have the navigational abilities that they were once prized for, but if you were to put a pigeon from 2022 in a carrier and drive it across a continent in a virtually blind state, it would still be able to make its way back home with the confidence, speed, and accuracy of a wartime-era messenger bird. Speaking to a bygone era of respect, Cher Ami, a WWI service messenger bird credited with saving the lives of 194 men was revered as a national hero, and at its peak the USA’s WWII Pigeon Service possessed over fifty-thousand birds. But how do pigeons - and other homing birds - manage this feat? Research suggests that the “map-and-compass” system by which pigeons navigate employs not only a visualisation of the Earth’s magnetic field, but also comprehensive understanding of varying types of information, from the sun, stars and weather to features of the landscape. A pigeon may be a more effective GPS than an actual GPS, fitted with technology developed over aeons by the rigorous evolutionary testing process.
Although the pigeon may seem to be dull, dirty, and guided solely by a ravenous hunger for discarded polystyrene food boxes, closer examination reveals a bird of unexpected depth, ingenuity, and intelligence. Next time you catch a pigeon in the street, throw it a chip, and wonder at the strangeness of even small things.