Down the Pigeon Hole: Part One
The Surprising Truth About Pigeons and Modern Society - How These Birds Are the Unsung Heroes of Our Urban Jungles and a Reflection of Ourselves.
Nowadays, anyone with an online presence has little choice but to hitchhike along a highway of increasingly temperamental algorithms. Subsequently, influencers, politicians and celebrities fling themselves at these breakneck trends and either zoom into the sunset or get flattened in the process. Merely clinging to relevance on these ever-changing streets requires extreme focus, incredible luck and maybe even a little deception.
We come to Joe the Pigeon, who hitched a ride to internet stardom after reportedly flying from America to Australia. An arduous journey even some musicians are unwilling to undertake. But despite Joe's remarkable efforts, the Australian government labelled him a biosecurity risk and condemned him to death.
Suddenly, all eyes were on those inauspicious pests pecking about our city's overflowing bins. Was Joe among them? Was there a reward for his capture? Could anyone really bring themselves to kill a hapless pigeon? Who cares about pigeons, anyway?
Well, lots of people, apparently. Opposing hashtags and memes flooded social media, and while some rose to Joe's defence, others demanded his death.
In any case, it soon emerged that Joe's identification tag was a forgery and that the shoulder-shrugging tabloids failed in their due diligence. And despite issuing no corrections (Al Jazeera still has the unedited piece on their website), the entire hoax was swiftly ejected from the passenger seat. Once again, Joe and pigeons everywhere were left in the algorithm's dust as it sped towards The Macca Penguin Photography Awards.
But for a short time, Joe's controversy briefly granted a mere pigeon the same inexplicable popularisation as the Australian White Ibis.
Indeed, the internet is no stranger to idolising birds. Thanks mainly to social media's obsession with anomalies, the Australian White Ibis has gone from a grotesque urban pest to a merchandisable, cosmopolitan icon. But even with Joe's assistance and social media's characteristic volatility, a pigeon renaissance, while well-deserved and timely, seems highly unlikely under any circumstances.
Why?
Perhaps our overexposure to pigeons causes us to see them as mindless vermin that dig through our bins, scavenge our waste, roost in our squalid infrastructure and foul our bustling streets. But does this perspective tell the whole story? Why do we see these incredibly adaptive birds as little more than parasites infesting our city streets? Would it be fair to say that pigeons reflect our failures? Undoubtedly, were pigeons capable of introspection (more to come on this), they would look at our slovenly societies; the mountains of rubbish, the casually dropped scraps, the flightless bodies squeezed into overcrowded dwellings; and think us filthy, featherbrained pests. Of course, some of their attributes are not particularly desirable from humanity's perspective, but these fascinating birds truly deserve a share in the Australian White Ibis' recently won spoils.
When one starts paying close attention to pigeons - as I have since falling down this bottomless hole - it's immediately obvious that they are barely seen as living creatures. And though we thoughtlessly trample through pigeon flocks without a sideways glance, they seem to consider humans as an equally forgettable nuisance.
Indeed, despite living in close quarters with the world's most successful predators, pigeons simply bob between us with a passivity that borders on bravery. They waddle between our toes, crisscross through traffic, streak turds down our monuments with impunity and ultimately dominate our cities' ecosystems.
So, one thing about urban pigeons, rock doves, feral pigeons, gutter rats or members of the Columbidae family (if you're feeling fancy); is that they have enjoyed considerably better press throughout most of human history than they do today. Turning back the clock, evidence suggests that pigeons were among the first animals domesticated by Neolithic humans, leading to crude farming and captive breeding programs, which eventually culminated in today's commonplace strains. Furthermore, their celebrity status is evident in Mesopotamia, ancient Greece, Egypt and Rome, where our ancestors worshipped them in religious rituals, immortalised them in effigies, hailed them in epics and utilised them as messengers. This last is a practice that continued well into the modern era. Therefore, the relationships humans have formed with pigeons have ultimately decided the fates of entire ecosystems, societies and economies.
Where did it all go wrong? How did this once noble bird, so intertwined with our history and identity as a species, wind up wholly detached from modern sensibilities while simultaneously reaching record population density? Indeed, are the pigeon's opportunistic lifestyles and subsequent image problems a reflection of humanity's industrialised fall from grace? Considering that urban pigeons trace their lineage to escaped captives and that our creations mimic their natural habitats, one could say that their overwhelming success is another instance of humanity letting genies out of bottles. Consequently, perhaps our aversion to pigeons comes from how effortlessly they exploit and exacerbate our shortsightedness.
The truth is, pigeons thrive due to our overflowing bins, our pollution-stained atmospheres, our self-inflicted lack of biodiversity, our willful ignorance towards the less fortunate, our apathy towards the general decay of our institutions, our toxic fixation on appearances and our obsession with hustling and bustling through steadily crumbling city streets.
Then again, like so many other invasive species, perhaps pigeons are just unremarkable, systemic pests.
Certainly, one common argument against pigeons is that they are visually unappealing. Grime-coated feathers, shit-streaked roosts, and the garbage through which they confidently strut often obscure urban pigeons. However, on closer inspection, one quickly realises that pigeons possess a conservative yet dazzling beauty that shines through their unfortunate surroundings.
Like seagulls (arguably as endemic), urban pigeons once made their roosts in cliffs and caves. They would likely have continued to do so had humans not seen their potential and dragged them along for the ride. While the Columbidae family consists of 175 members, all of which possess a range of diverse and distinguishing features, for the moment, let's focus specifically on Columba livia domestica.
When viewed with a less biased eye, Columba livia domestica is far more beautiful than our bias suggests. A pigeon's body is a structural cosmos of shifting ethereal greys, delicately laced and lined with eclipsing black threads, neatly contrasted against two explosive eyes and rounded with a tasteful white dab over its inoffensive beak. And taken with the shimmering iridescent swirls of muted green and purple that ripples around their necks, pigeons, especially with their wings spread, comprise an intricately woven tapestry of shifting minimalism.
While Columba livia domestica's appearance is comparatively tame against absurdist birds like the Australian White Ibis, many of us see them every day against a dreary corporate backdrop from which we may wish to escape.
But there was a time when our ancestors bred these pigeons with the same obsessive glee as modern humans mutating designer dogs. And, believe it or not, these selective breeding programs are an institution that has endured into the modern age. Specially bred Fancy pigeons routinely auction for hundreds and sometimes even thousands of dollars. Occasionally, particularly prized birds are liable to fetch six-figure sums, while meticulously bred racing pigeons can soar into the millions. Currently, the record stands at a staggering $1.9 million. Some Fancy pigeons are in such high demand that organised crime rings specifically target the industry. Likewise, billionaires publically engage in ostentatious bidding wars over the most renowned racers.
But perhaps this says more about humanity's frivolous, competitive and rapacious ways than it does about the pigeon's overall worth as a species. After all, humanity's obsession with acquiring curiosities has an often chequered history. For example, Napoleon's doctor, François Carlo Antommarchi, supposedly stole the fallen Emperor's penis during his autopsy, and no one exactly forced Elon Musk to buy Twitter (kind of). So, are urban pigeons and their fancy cousins really not worth their weight in excrement?
On first impressions, the pigeon's trademark coos -while endearing and another example of their uniqueness - swells to a droning chorus in large numbers. Likewise, their plodding bodies and bobbing heads resemble broken wind-up toys.
But the mechanism behind this seemingly random pecking that pigeons display is a highly attuned pattern recognition system, a complex neural network capable of maintaining monogamous relationships, playing the piano, participating in ping pong and differentiating between healthy and cancerous breast tissue. Considering this, even urban pigeons, when given a chance, possess a level of intelligence for which those in the know are willing to pay.
Over the years, pigeons have served as everything from crude missile guidance systems to discerning art critics. While this supposedly feral species falls under the demeaning term lab rats in scientific circles, researchers favour pigeons as (like humans) the acute perception they display is linked to their physiological makeup. In this way, pigeons surpass many primates in accuracy and complexity when faced with certain tests. In addition, studies show that pigeons navigate the world through a refined combination of memory and cognitive decisions, suggesting a much deeper level of existence than that random-park-pecking implies.
For example, while references to homing pigeons are found throughout history, everyday people have given these remarkable journeys as much thought as the science behind their text messages. While the exact mechanisms by which pigeons navigate such incredible distances remain hotly contested, their invariable accuracy is indisputable. One prevailing theory proposes that pigeons navigate the world through acute olfactory senses, memory and magnetoreception. Combine this with their ability to fly at speeds of 97km/h over distances of 1800km while laden with packages weighing 75g, and you get the 1898 Great Barrier Pigeon-Gram Service, the first delivery service to use airmail stamps.
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