My friend E.B. Bartels recently joked that I should start a pigeon newsletter. We have a regular email exchange of Quality Pigeon Content ⟨™⟩ that began when E.B. began adopting rescue pigeons (who procreated to make a third which has since escaped and now lurks in her neighborhood…the saga itself is Quality Pigeon Content), and she discovered I had a brief, secret childhood hobby of keeping pigeons.
While I promise Notions & Notes will not become Quality Pigeon Content, I am feeling like taking a break from exploring broader themes to do a series of deep dives into the content of one, very specific thing . I’m curious what I’ll discover about that thing.
So we’re starting with pigeons. You may wonder how much Quality Pigeon Content is even out there, and my friends, this is a curated selection of only the finest! There is much, much more to pigeons than you ever imagined.
I Find Myself Defending Pigeons
by Keith Wilson
I love how you never find their bodies, how they never rest their eyes. I love how their breasts are comforters unfolding by their breath. I love that pigeons live in the city, that underestimation never stopped a pigeon from unlatching itself or being old. I want them all unspooling in the air, and bridges that are half sigh and half pigeon. I want to harbor their coo and utilize it for energy. I want to learn to use them the way they want to be used. I want to pigeontail into a quiet night, to let their oddness sit in our hands. You can never know a language until you quiet your own. I want people to write about them. Their leaving ships for land, or standing on their own on a marble statue in the shimmer of a field. I want to talk about the term rock dove, argue over whether or not it's imperialist. I want the media to implicate us in the pigeon problem, for a couple to sit with their asparagus and kids and realize none of this is far from them, whatever we think. I want oils and watercolors and inks. I want still life with pigeons, since not a one has ever been portrayed with a soul: a flight of them around old bread. And how they're all the same. How all the world is here with them in hate, since they are rats adorned with angel wings, and the children down the street are free to chase their drag: they want to see a pigeon's rouge entirely. Let the pigeon have her pigment. Consider the pigeon's brown and green and everything, the brandishing of his nakedness to the sun, as if nothing is absolute. I love the pigeons' shoulders, tongues, and wedding nights. I love the pigeon's place in history, their obsession with living in the letters of our signs. I love their minds, or what I've come to believe is their theology. Who knows? Let the pigeons speak. Ask the closest pigeon for his number, for her middle name, if they are ready to die, if the sky gets crowded enough to consider war, if their stores are closed on Sundays. I want to be ready for them to be just like us, but more ready for them to be completely different. I don't want to waste any time tracing a pigeon's god to Abraham. I want to get started. Some of us feed pigeons. I love, sometimes, our care. I love, I think, the park bench. I love apples, but I do not love pears. The weather. I love the pigeons, the revolution of wheel to sky. I love the newspaper graying in a different air.
When I was working toward my MFA, I’d kill time before class or a meeting sitting at a desk by the window on the 10th floor of a building overlooking the Boston Common. From that height, flocks of pigeons spun globes and arcs in the sky with unbelievable beauty. This poem does that feeling, that sight, justice. I also had the privilege of publishing a few poems by Keith while editing for Emerson’s literary journal, and I highly recommend his book where this poem is published.
Devin Kelly, whose newsletter I can’t recommend enough times, has an excellent essay on this poem.
I want them all unspooling in the air, and bridges that are half sigh and half pigeon.
This article about a photographer discovering the birdhouses, or chabutras, of Gujarat, India offers a glimpse into how human communities can co-exist with nature’s communities, rather than be in opposition to them.
In much of India, housing and feeding birds is a common practice. But in different cities, the collective affinity for birds expresses itself in different ways. Some communities participate in pigeon-rearing, known as kabootar-baazi, which involves taming the birds, caring for their health, training them to fly in a particular direction based on verbal commands and preparing them for flying competitions. Others focus on conservation efforts.
The houses aren’t simply places for the birds to stay. They also act as communal spaces. Elder men and women sit under their shade. Children play nearby. Festivals are sometimes held around them.
I discovered the artist and pigeon racer Duke Riley because I’ve gotten a few tattoos at his tattoo parlor, but I’ve come to love his multi-faceted art. This is a great mini-documentary of an art piece I wish I could have seen in real life.
This bird—a mere twelve ounces— tries to lift its soft wings against my hands. Its poor beak is hardly a scrap of pinky toenail. I can feel its over-bred heart racing, the warmth of its blood through its belly feathers. It is agitated and mutant and beautiful. Its name is Sophia Loren.
It takes a while to get through David Gavin Franks’s longform essay “Inexplicably Surviving: Dispatch from a Fancy Pigeon Show”. It’s a profoundly sad and dark look at the subculture of fancy pigeon breeding with the backdrop of post-Aparteid South Africa. But it’s stunning writing that makes a reader a more humane witness to the world.
The bird stops pecking at my hands, realizing perhaps, that, in spite of what her instincts may be telling her, she no longer has the bodily tools to defend herself in this way, to break my skin. She cocks her tapered head, stares me down. I’m convinced that the coldness runs from the bird’s amber eyes, and that a strange affection replaces it. Why do we always try to hurt the ones we love? Of course, my being convinced of this should tell me more about myself than about the bird. Maybe it’s not the bird at all that seems to be asking me, What are we doing? Why are we here?
Throughout the essay Frank humanizes the pigions in ways that scientists generally would frown upon. Yet this humanization stands in contrast to the grotesque and inhumane people who’s breeding practices create these birds in the first place.
I can feel Sophia’s heart against my hands. I wonder if she is depressed, or scared, or bored, or aware of the fact that these people think she’s gorgeous precisely because she’s useless. Because, to live, she needs us as her keepers. She needs our brains and our hands, our silence and our noise. Like many of us, she depends on that which should drive her mad.
The essay is more about asking what it means to be human than pigeon. And we can’t—we shouldn’t—look away from the truths revealed at a fancy pigeon show. I truly hope you set aside an afternoon for this existentially bleak essay, becuase if we look away
One of my earliest and most popular episodes of Notions & Notes included the architecture of bird nests, and indeed, nests usually inspire wonder at nature’s art and innovation. But pigeon nests are practical. Some would say their nests are shitty.
As the linked article explains, their nests are admirable in their bare-bones practicality. Pigeons have adapted so well to the world of humans, that they don’t expend energy on nests more than a few twigs. All they need is to keep the egg from rolling off a ledge, and in a constructed world of flat surfaces, that doesn’t take much.
In my last episode, I shared a clip from a Jim Jarmusch film, and I shouldn’t share another one so soon, but how could I have a whole episode without including the best pigeon outburst in all of cinema. (The full scene becomes even more absurd, but includes the n-word).
Another clip from the film shows Ghost Dog, the samurai hitman who communicates through pigeons played by Forest Whitaker. It’s a gorgeous contrast of grace, sincerity, and openness to the dark, ironic interiority of the mob world. It’s one of the few films where the mafia guys are more like the petty, racist, criminals of real life than the anti-heroes they’re usually portrayed as.
I made it this far through a collection of Pigeon Content without bringing up their famous navigational skills. I’ve learned enough about bird navigation to be properly awed. Scientists have been learning a lot lately about the science of animal navigation (I read this New Yorker article reviewing two newish books about the subject sometime in the pandemic and was looking for an excuse to share it in Notions & Notes). Scientists keep disproving each other’s theories and discoveries by running experiments that deprive pigeons of some sense or another. They’ve found pigeons rely on various compass cues like the sun and stars, landmarks, and the Earth’s magnetic fields (they have magnetite in their beaks like tiny compass needles!). But they also rely on infrasound, low-frequency sound waves that travel hundreds of miles. Olfactory sensors also play a factor in making a cognitive map. As with other instances of several competing theories for how something works, the truth is a combination of them. Birds have sensors all over their bodies, not just in their brains.
I loved Jennifer Ackerman’s The Genius of Birds and in her chapter on navigation, she writes about the cognitive processes in bird brains:
If a migrating lapwing or reed warbler is blown half-way across the country by a storm, perhaps the information her senses gather from all of her sources—from the scents of land and sea, from magnetic signatures and anomalies, from the slant of sunlight and the starry pattern of the night skies—all funnels into the connective core in her brain, where it’s integrated and then fans out to the brain regions that will help guide her to her natal ground. In the bird brain, then, a small-world network may create a big-world map.
There’s still a lot of mystery to be understood by science, and that should make you feel a sense of awe.
So what have I learned from looking deeply at this bird? That they’re both absurd and practical, graceful and disregarded. That we make a mirror of them and see in pigeons an incredibly broad range of qualities we want to see or are afraid of in ourselves.That they’re part of our human lives and communities in profound ways. That they’re pretty damn amazing.
Stay tuned for more deep dives on the moon, the color blue, plant reproduction, and we’ll see what else.
And go get E.B.’s book on loving and grieving animals. I promise it’ll make you cry at least once.