The Urban Bestiary

by Lyanda Lynn Haupt

  I have been studying the sparrows today, all day. Two males have been hopping furtively about the chicken run, skulking like baby chicks right beneath the bellies of the hens, who oddly don’t seem to mind their presence (they will chase crows and squirrels). To enter the coop, the sparrows didn’t fly through the big door on the front but followed the hens through the little chicken door on the side, hopping behind them. Funny. But once inside the coop, they didn’t eat the cracked corn and poultry mash, which I assumed was their reason for being there in the first place; instead, they looked for something, heads turned to the side, eyes cast down, persistent. Finally I realized they were searching for feathers and were finicky in the extreme about the ones they chose. Individual feathers were picked up, examined, discarded. Of course—it’s early spring, and the sparrows are looking to literally feather the nest. I’d seen nests near my house featuring the feathers of my own chickens, but I’d never actually watched the gathering, and I’d assumed the feathers used were random ones that had blown into the yard. Who knew the sparrows were actually choosing the exact feathers they wanted? Esmeralda, the fat and beautiful barred rock hen, had been molting, so in addition to the usual small downy bits, there were large wing and tail feathers. Finally, one male house sparrow selected the very biggest and longest—a primary wing feather. Such a prize! The feather was larger than he was but weighed nothing; he picked it up horizontally in his bill and attempted to make off with it, flying straight into the hogwire fence. Hogwire is characterized by vertical wire rectangles, two by four inches each, a good sparrow-size opening but not a sparrow-with-long-feather-size opening. I was stunned to observe what happened next: the sparrow dropped to the ground, put his feather down, walked through the fence, then reached his head in, grabbed the tip of the feather, and pulled it through. This was problem-solving, the sort of thing we expect from primates and maybe the higher avian orders, such as corvids and parrots. Certainly not from a plain, hated little sparrow. Yet here it is—the unexpected grandeur of the commonplace.

  It is one of the curious twists of the urban bestiary that sparrows and starlings give us an opportunity to learn even more of certain ornithological secrets than we can from native birds in wilder places. Being approachable, accessible, and legally unprotected, they offer scope for careful home study. Nests of native birds should always be left undisturbed—not only is it illegal to mess with them, but it makes the adult birds fussy, and might call the attention of predators—jays, crows, coons, cats—to the presence of the nest. For scrappy house sparrows and starlings, such things are of little concern, and all kinds of possibilities emerge for the amateur naturalist, or family science project. Peer into the nest every few days as the nestlings grow, and observe the feather tracts and order of feather growth. Let your child carefully hold one of the hot, fat-bellied, transparently skinned little babies (and try it yourself). This will change a child’s sense forever of what it means to see a bird on the nest (adult birds will not “smell human” on their chick and abandon it).

  Professional scientists make use of the house sparrows’ abundance and the public’s lack of concern for the species in their research as well. The literature is immense, with nearly five thousand academic papers gathered in a scientific bibliography of the genus, and it overflows with studies of avian metabolism, thermoregulation, evolutionary mechanisms, and the role of birds in pest control. Even so, some simple things about the daily habits and natural history of the bird are astonishingly little-known. We have gained a great knowledge of avian circadian rhythms from house sparrows in the lab, but there is still more to learn about the most common bird on earth as she goes about her day in the world. Daily time expenditures—how much eating, sleeping, nesting, and preening occurs in a normal sparrow’s twenty-four-hour period—is not well studied. We know very little about the complex house sparrow social structure; intraspecies communication, both vocal and physical; and how these shape their days and lives. Any amateur watcher can contribute to the understanding of the species by watchful note-taking from an apartment lanai. And there will always be more to learn from this species about ourselves—how our presence creates and encourages the presence of house sparrows and the absence of other birds. How our habits and the wild are incontrovertibly mingled.

  While starlings and house sparrows are reviled for their ecological impact, the ecological ramifications of pigeon presence appears to be negligible. In the wild, rock pigeons nest on cliffs. In cities, they substitute steep building eaves and ledges. The nest is simple—just a bit of straw, grasses, small sticks—and they’re located in places that few native urban birds would find acceptable. Pigeons even provide an unexpected ecological benefit as the perfect food source for once-endangered peregrine falcons that have moved into urban places. (In Trafalgar Square, where pigeons are prolific and pooping on the statuary, it was proposed that falconers release their birds to cull the populations. Animal-rights activists went mad in pigeon defense. When I visited London a few years back, my shoulder bag was stuffed with Save the Pigeon flyers I was handed in my wanderings. U.S. animal activists can’t hold a candle to the zeal of Londoners.)

  Even so, as a nonnative bird of presumably small brain at home in the murkiest corners of the inner city, the pigeon is singularly disrespected. In Seattle a few years ago, several downtown pigeons were shot in the head with needles. The needles were each about four inches long, and it was surmised they had been launched through a peashooter sort of apparatus. It didn’t kill the pigeons, so they’d walk around with the needles sticking out—very creepy. This just wouldn’t happen to any other bird.

  The official common name of the pigeon was recently changed from rock dove to rock pigeon, in order to bring the colloquial English in line with international trends. Taxonomically, there is no difference between a pigeon and a dove. Pigeons and doves are in the Columbidae family, and they are all closely related. There is a colloquial separation in their common names, based mainly on size, with the larger birds being called pigeons, the smaller being called doves, and no objective dividing line between the two.

  I preferred the term rock dove, which served as a reminder—and a surprise to some—that pigeons really are doves. People tend to separate them in their thoughts and attitudes. Doves are seen as clean in feather and heart, gentle, peaceful, calming, even holy somehow, and they have the prettiest blue eyelids. Pigeons are viewed as grimy, poopy, pestilential, and they suffer the indignity of being utterly commonplace in human habitations. But the columbids we call doves are certainly no cleaner than the ones we call pigeons—even the deepest urban pigeon is scrupulously well-groomed, iridescent, and tidy of feather. Tar on her coral-red feet, perhaps, but no dirtier than a woodland-wandering mourning dove.

  Though Darwin’s finches have all the fame, Darwin wrote far more about pigeons than he ever wrote about the Galapagos finches or all of the island birds put together. The entire first chapter of the Origin of Species is devoted to pigeons, as are nearly one hundred pages of his Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication. It is common knowledge that pigeons were important to Darwin but less commonly known that pigeons were also beloved by Darwin. His studies led him down the road of personal obsession, where he kept a private dovecote and hobnobbed below his class with the pigeon fanciers of London, learning their secrets. For Darwin, pigeons offered the perfect domestic analogy for the way natural selection functions through variety within lineage in wild nature.

  Darwin never questioned the consciousness of animals, and given that he spent so much time interacting with his beloved Almond Tumblers, I doubt that he would have been surprised by the recent study published in the journal Science demonstrating math competence in pigeons. They can not only discriminate quantities but also learn abstract mathematical concepts. Researchers in the Department of Psychology at the University of Otago in New Zealand began by teaching pigeons to order the numbers 1, 2, and 3. Images would appear on a touch screen, each with one, two, or three objects
, and the pigeons learned to peck the images in ascending numerical order. When they did so correctly, they were given a wheat snack. Next, they were tested with a more abstract rule. Presented with pairs of images containing anywhere between one and nine objects, the pigeons again had to determine ascending order—if they were shown a group of four things and a group of seven, for example, they were supposed to peck the group of four first. “Remarkably,” said lead author Damian Scarf, “the pigeons were able to respond to these novel pairs correctly.” And even more remarkable to primate-biased humans? “Their performance was indistinguishable from that of two rhesus monkeys that had been previously trained on this task.” We might be less surprised if the birds were among those we already consider to be intelligent (Alex the African gray parrot understood the concept of zero, an abstraction that humans don’t normally comprehend until they are three or four and that we have long considered beyond any animal, let alone a bird). But pigeons can navigate by the stars. Why should we be flummoxed when we learn they can count to nine?

  Urban Pigeon Project

  Darwin would have been intrigued by the question that prompted the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s Urban Pigeon Project. The fact that individual pigeons are uniquely colored is a scientific mystery. The natural color of the rock pigeon is that nice blue-gray we see so often, with iridescent purple trim. But in urban places, while the natural color is the most common, we see all sorts of other pigeon colors as well—whites, browns, golds, pied black-and-whites. It makes no sense—according to the laws of natural selection, anomalies should be either weeded out (meaning that the errant colors would show up only occasionally) or, if they lead to reproductive success for the birds in some way, propagated (meaning the pigeons should all be multicolored). Cornell’s ornithological labs have organized a citizen science effort to research the various pigeon colors, and anyone can take part.

  New research by ornithologists at Uppsala University in Sweden shows that a disproportionate number of urban birds have big brains. That is, the size of the brain in relation to the body is larger in urban birds than in similar birds who do not take up in urban places—presumably, the larger brain size allows for the adaptability, innovation, and plasticity of behavior required of city birds. No one wants to say yet that this correlates with higher intelligence, but the implication is there, and the surprising capacities of house sparrows and starlings and, now, pigeons appear to bear this out. Scientists who live-trap house sparrows report that they quickly learn to obtain the tasty bait without tripping the trap (and once caught, they are funny; rather than flapping about restlessly like most birds, they seem calm, sitting or walking around as if studying their novel situation). In New Zealand, a flock of the birds has become notorious for entering a city bus station through the sliding glass door—they’ve learned to fly in front of the sensor that activates the doors, nibble on the treats left by untidy travelers, then leave the way they came. We have finally come to understand just how intelligent corvids and parrots may be. Now we have problem-solving sparrows, musical starlings, and mathematician pigeons! The entire creaturely world, it seems, is busy tossing our presumptions back in our faces.

  Most of the birds in the urban landscape are songbirds (as are starlings and house sparrows) or park waterfowl, perhaps with a few gulls, hummingbirds, and flickers thrown in. Pigeons are something altogether different—a ubiquitous but unique presence among us, affording us the opportunity to study avian adaptations and diversity across different taxonomic groups. We see pigeons bursting into flight with the suddenness that ground-dwelling birds require. Rather than perching like songbirds do, pigeons roost—more of a sitting on top of something than a strong grasping. Their feet are fatter and shorter, and their toenails are less curved, more dull. On the same substrate, a crow will make a complete track, a full outline of the crow foot and toenails, while the pigeon will make just a suggestion of a pigeon foot. Just as humans have handedness, pigeons have footedness. Watch pigeons land, and you will see that one foot touches the ground and stabilizes the bird before the other foot, and for an individual bird, it is always the same foot. As in humans, the right is typically dominant, with a small percentage of birds being left-footed (about the same percentage as humans who are left-handed), and an even smaller percentage change feet, or land on both feet at the same time—ambipedalous pigeons.

  Pigeons are the only birds on earth that drink by submersing the entire bill into a pond or puddle and sucking water up, rather like a horse. Other birds dip their bills, then tip their heads up, allowing water to trickle down their throats. Related is the pigeon’s need for an impressive volume of water—5 percent of its own body weight daily.

  The flatter, fatter track of a pigeon, alongside the classic songbird tracks of the starling and house sparrow

  Pigeons are not the easiest birds to raise from tiny hatchlings. Once they are a couple weeks old, they can eat a nutritious seed mash, but very small squabs get crop milk from their parents—a thick, soupy mixture produced in the crop of both male and female pigeons. It’s not actual milk, which is unique to mammals, but it is chemically similar. To drink it, the young stick their heads way into the adult’s throat and suck the crop milk up. It makes them fat and happy, and by the time they leave the nest, at about four weeks old, they will weigh nearly as much as their parents. I’ve raised a few mourning doves and pigeons, and I tried to re-create the experience of drinking crop milk for the babies. I mixed meat baby food with a thick canned liquid baby formula, Similac, added crushed vitamins, and put the whole thing in a baby bottle. I cut a slit in the tip of the bottle’s nipple, held the bird in my lap, and pressed its little bill into the opening. Without exception, every chick eagerly sucked up my DIY crop milk and grew healthy. You have to do something like this if you try to feed baby pigeons, because, unlike songbirds, they don’t open their bills wide, gaping for food that the adults drop in. The only problem with my method was that it made an absolute mess, with sticky fake crop milk dribbling down the chicks’ breasts. I put little bibs on them but still had to administer tiny dove baths to keep a Similac crust from forming over the feathers. Real pigeon parents don’t seem to have this problem. Hand-raised pigeons are delightfully tame, cuddly, gentle, and have the endearing habit of settling all warm and feathery under the hair at the base of your neck.

  Pigeons are highly confrontational with one another when mining communal food sources or competing for mates, sometimes attacking other birds (though usually the “attack” is symbolic male posturing). Parental care does not extend long beyond fledging, so the young of the year, unused to the pigeon-eat-pigeon way of things, fare worst among the foraging flocks; they are the butt of most attacks, and when autumn arrives, the most underfed birds in the flock.

  Even so, the pigeons’ mythical reputation for peace and gentleness is mostly well earned. Pigeons are in general not aggressive with non-pigeons. Their soft breasts and sweet cooing have made them symbolic of wise femininity, and they perch on the shoulders of the most beautiful goddesses across cultures, including Astarte, Isis, and Athena. Though in ancient Japan, pigeons were considered messengers of war, in the modern world, we are more commonly inspired by their mythic sense of calm gentility—carriers of the olive branch, bearers of peace and love. In this spirit, we send them forth at weddings and at funerals. My favorite mythological image of the pigeon comes from the Festival of the Circumcision of Christ, where a pigeon holds, instead of an olive branch, the divine prepuce in its bill.

  Ever since the 1800s, pigeons have been used in wartime. During both World Wars, the U.S. Army Pigeon Service was an official unit (there was a similar unit in Europe) maintaining dovecotes for birds that could fly with secret messages beneath radio interception. In World War II, more than three thousand soldiers maintained fifty-four thousand pigeons, and 90 percent of the messages sent by pigeon were received. The Maidenform Bra company designed a pigeon bra (though the preferred name for the thing was pigeon vest) that would hold
pigeons close to a paratrooper’s chest as he jumped from a plane. Pigeons have literally saved thousands of human lives. In 1943, the UK animal-welfare pioneer Maria Dickin instituted the awarding of the Dickin Medal, a bronze circlet stamped with a laurel wreath and bearing the words For Gallantry and We Also Serve, to honor animals that have shown particular valor during military service. Of the sixty-five medals awarded thus far, thirty-two were draped around the feathered necks of pigeons; the others went to horses and dogs. Hero pigeons include Winkie, who was released with a message out of desperation by a World War II British aircrew forced to ditch in the North Sea. They’d given themselves up for dead when they remembered Winkie, and attached an SOS to her leg, doubtlessly whispered a prayer over her blue head, and let her go. She flew home, where her owner found her exhausted, read the note, and alerted the Royal Air Force, who swiftly mounted a successful rescue. (The crew later held a dinner where Winkie was toasted as the guest of honor.) The pigeon Mary of Exeter was awarded the Dickin Medal for carrying messages back and forth across the English Channel during her five-year service, in spite of being injured three times and having her loft bombed. The most famous decorated American pigeon is the World War II bird G.I. Joe. The village of Calvi Vecchia, Italy, was scheduled to be bombed by the Allied forces, and at the last minute, G.I. Joe delivered the message that the village was occupied by the British, and the bombing was abandoned, saving not only the British occupiers but also the civilian inhabitants of the village.