In Justin Herman Plaza, after I’d worked up a sweat running around pushing the stroller, I lured Josephine into semistillness by offering to let her feed the pigeons.
“Want to give them some bread?” I asked.
“Huh,” was her affirmative grunt.
A pair of pigeons had landed on the grass nearby and they bobbed forward, murmuring. Josephine took two slices of bread from me and hurled both overhand at the birds. Immediately, there were wings everywhere around us. At least ten pigeons fought for the scraps. A big seagull landed and swallowed the remaining crust whole. Three more seagulls appeared. Other pigeons came fluttering down. I felt my old phobia twinging as the birds edged closer, eyeing us, I thought, remorselessly.
There’s something about swarming that stimulates horror deep within the subterranean unconscious. Alfred Hitchcock understood that this horror was universal enough to fuel The Birds with primal potency. When pigeons proliferate, they also cause more obvious, surface-level problems. An adult pigeon splatters out more than twenty-five pounds of feces a year. Fungi, such as aspergillus, feed on those white stains, and in the process generate acids that eat into statues and other stonework. The damages add up to more than a billion dollars a year in the United States alone, according to one estimate. It’s likely that we spend even more than that on the pigeon-control industry, which installs spikes, netting, and tiny electric fences on buildings.
Daniel Haag-Wackernagel, a biologist at the University of Basel, Switzerland, is the probably the foremost expert on urban pigeons, and he says that none of this amounts to a real solution. Pigeons will endure shocks, fight their way through nets, and mutilate themselves on spikes to get to their homes. “No repellent system we tested can keep a pigeon away if it wants to reach its squabs in the nest,” Haag-Wackernagel wrote; “motivation is simply too strong.” Barriers can work if a building owner kills the squabs and clears out the nests. But even this only relocates the problem. The pigeon-control industry does steady work, pushing the birds along from one customer to the next. It’s analogous (again) to the problem of homelessness: Cities try to solve the problem by hassling the homeless, telling them to move on. As a San Francisco cop once told me, “Every now and then a politician decides to sweep everyone out of one place and into another. And we’re the broom.” The pigeon-control businesses profit with every sweep.
There is another option for bird control: Cities have tried to exterminate pigeons with poison, traps, falcons, and even what Haag-Wackernagel calls a pigeon “electric chair”—essentially, a lethal electrified bird feeder. None of it has worked. For every pigeon that dies, another appears within days. The birds are simply too fecund: They reproduce so quickly that unless we were willing to kill the majority of birds in a city every year, we’d never make a dent.
The number of pigeons that live in a city, it turns out, is not determined by nesting space or by predation, but by the availability of food. After World War II, there was a revolution in agriculture: Munitions factories were retrofitted to produce fertilizer and food became cheap. Food became so abundant that people started throwing a lot of it away, often in places where pigeons could get at it.
Before World War II, pigeons filled their crops in daily flights from their nests in the cities to farms, or to seed-transport stations on the railways. This commute is a thing of the past. Pigeons now eat close to home, avoiding the long risky flight that made them vulnerable to predation by raptors.
No matter how plentiful the food, the population always grows until there are more beaks than crumbs. I watched that principle at work as pigeons fluttered down from perches around the park and gobbled up our bread.
“Papa,” Josephine said plaintively, displaying her empty hands, “they need food.”
The kind of feeding that Josephine was doing, tossing out the occasional crust or sharing a bit of lunch, is not significant enough to make a difference, according to Haag-Wackernagel. The real problem is litter and massive regular feedings. When pigeons can come to a spot day in and day out for a guaranteed meal, their populations explode. And it’s in this population explosion that the true problems arise. Roosting areas become crowded and filthy. Diseases and parasites spread. Birds become more aggressive. Shit splatters everywhere. Anyone who dares to toss out a little bread is immediately engulfed in a tornado of wings.
In 1988 Haag-Wackernagel helped the Swiss city of Basel launch the first truly successful pigeon-control program. The key component of this program was aimed not at pigeons, but at humans. It turned out that just a few individuals were responsible for the lion’s share of feeding. These were mostly elderly, ragged folk for whom pigeon feeding is the central reason for being. They were covertly dumping pounds of grain, sometimes several times a day. “Pigeon feeders are often individuals who have no one to care for. The pigeons play an important role in replacing emotional ties,” Haag-Wackernagel wrote in a report on the project. But it’s not just unfortunate, slightly crazy people. Animal-rights groups and at least one neighborhood organization have reluctantly begun feeding large quantities of grain to pigeons because they feel a moral obligation to prevent the birds from starving. This is ridiculously wrongheaded, according to Haag-Wackernagel, because while feeding pigeons may indeed prevent some from starving, it increases the sum total of pigeon suffering. And so in Basel, Haag-Wackernagel helped authorities launch a campaign to teach the public that feeding pigeons is actually harmful to the species’ population at large.
“We drastically demonstrated the negative effects of feeding, e.g., by pamphlets and posters showing shocking pictures of baby pigeons infected by diseases and parasites,” Haag-Wackernagel wrote in another report. “We tried to explain the complicated relationship between feeding and overcrowding and the density-dependent causes of the poor living conditions.”
All this made me reconsider my proposition that pigeons are innately revolting. It is humanity that has made pigeons disgusting. It is our own filth that has created the conditions that enable pigeon populations to swell to slum densities. In the end, there’s only one way to control pigeons, Haag-Wackernagel, says: We have to control ourselves.
Forging Connections Deep in Pigeon Habitat
After we’d attracted our first flock of birds, I decided it was probably time to bring the feeding to an end. But this made no sense to Jo. I’d promised to let her feed the pigeons, I still had three-quarters of a slice of bread, and the birds were obviously still interested. They approached, bowing at every step, edging relentlessly forward. Pigeons have mastered a form of interspecies body language. There’s something in the way that they approach that signals clearly to people that they are desperately interested in a snack. This language was crystal clear to my two-year-old: She was still learning the fundamentals of English, but she innately understood pigeon.
“They’re super hungry,” she repeated, imploringly.
We got the hang of feeding the pigeons eventually. The best technique was to let Jo dribble crumbs around my shoes so only the boldest of the birds would venture in, preventing a violent scrum.
The swarm dispersed, and the individuals that remained wandered about with a relieving lack of intensity. We sat on a retaining wall, Josephine’s feet dangling safely above a pair of black check pigeons, which scooted in to peck the bread, then scurried away again. The seagulls, less trusting, eyed us from a safe distance, a yard off.
When we ran out of bread, Jo wandered slowly into the park, following the birds. This time, though, instead of dashing manically, she settled onto her knees and watched. I sat and watched her watching.
A big, presumably male, pigeon had puffed out his neck feathers and was cooing assertively at a slimmer, presumably female, bird. The second bird kept inching away from his advances. I’d seen this scene acted out dozens of times, and I’d always assumed that I was witnessing courtship: a lothario pestering a girl who has no interest in him. But I’d learned that this is actually what’s called driving. The birds were a mate
d pair, and the male was herding the female back to his own territory, where he wouldn’t have to worry about other males competing for her affection. Courtship is more balanced. The males strut about, occasionally driving the females, bowing, and dragging their tails. But it’s less bullying and insistent. In the end, it’s the female who chooses among the males, and the pair solidifies their bond by feeding each other. The males’ boorishness only becomes apparent after the birds are bonded for life. I wasn’t going to try to convey any of this to Josephine quite yet.
I also did not tell her that, after mating, the male may, in Johnston’s words, “stand tall, and then launch into a display flight,” bringing his wings “smartly” together behind his back, clapping, presumably for himself. After reading this, I began to notice this clapping. Pigeons also clap their wings when straining to lift off vertically, but if it is a single bird making a triumphant ellipse of about a hundred feet and clapping periodically, I know.
An elderly Chinese man appeared from behind the sculpture, near where Jo knelt. He was feeding the pigeons too. I was too far away to understand the words that passed between him and Josephine, but each said something. They shared a moment of recognition, an acknowledgment of a mutual interest. These moments endear pigeons to the sociologist Colin Jerolmack, who appreciates the birds for their ability to bring very different people together. “I found that pigeon-feeding routines could become part of what Jane Jacobs called the ‘intricate sidewalk ballet’ that enriched pedestrians’ experience,” he wrote in his book The Global Pigeon. When people feed pigeons, he noticed, they also frequently strike up conversations with strangers who are doing the same. The opportunity to play with a wild thing provides some common ground for neighbors who may have nothing in common. This kind of casual shared experience is the foundation of friendship and, ultimately, of community. “While the child who takes heed of the birds around her might feel more connected to nature, she might also—or instead—feel more connected to her neighborhood,” Jerolmack wrote.
I might have walked over to say hello myself, but at that moment I noticed two birds just a couple feet away on the retaining wall where I was sitting. Remembering my original mission, I peered at their feet, and indeed, one was missing a toenail (or talon, if you will), while the other had a sort of clubfoot. Both looked perfectly healthy otherwise. My imagination hadn’t been embellishing pigeon deformities after all, or at least not generating them out of thin air. I snapped a few pictures. Then I lured Josephine into her stroller with the promise that we’d get ice cream in the ferry building before we went home.
A FEW FACTS TO SOFTEN HATRED OF PIGEONS
Feral pigeons are the same species as the birds bred to race, which have sold for more than $300,000 a bird. Those trained for racing can travel at up to 110 miles per hour for hours on end, propelled by massive breast muscles that constitute a third of their weight. Those breast muscles make them a culinary delicacy, and they are regularly served in fine restaurants. They have a mysterious ability to find their way home, no matter what scientists do to confuse them. Pigeons have received the highest military honors after delivering messages through storms of bullets. Pigeon post was the first major endeavor undertaken by one fledgling venture in journalism, which would become Reuters, the world’s largest news-gathering organization. Pigeons mate for life, and can live to the age of twenty.
Heroes of Science and Battle
Perhaps the most remarkable thing about these birds is their ability to find their way home, even when the distances, the navigational challenges, and deadly obstacles are of epic proportions. Homing pigeons are the same species as street pigeons, they have simply been bred and trained for racing. These thoroughbreds are about twice the weight of the average pigeon, and that mass resides mostly in the breast muscles.
Charlie Wolcott is perhaps the person who knows the most about pigeon navigation. He spent much of his scientific career confounded by the birds. He worked by coming up with hypotheses about the mechanism they use to find their way home, and then disabling that mechanism in test birds. If these handicapped birds didn’t make it home, it would prove that he’d found their technique. For example, when Wolcott and his team thought that perhaps the birds were navigating by sight, using landmarks, they fitted them with frosted goggles. The pigeons came home—though many circled aimlessly in the last mile. (Apparently, sight is important in the homestretch.) When they guessed that the birds were using Earth’s magnetic field to find their way, they strapped magnets to them. This had absolutely no effect. But when researchers strapped magnets to birds on a cloudy day, they were completely hornswoggled. This led Wolcott to a partial explanation:
“The pigeon uses [the] sun as a compass if it’s a sunny day; if it’s an overcast day, it switches and uses the earth’s magnetic field as its compass.”
Problem solved, right? Unfortunately, Wolcott said, finding the birds’ compass was only half the solution. If you were dropped in the middle of the wilderness with a compass, which way would you go to get home? You would know which way was north, but you would have no idea if you were north of your home. So, in addition to a compass, you’d need a map. And with pigeons, the map remains utterly mysterious.
“There are at least three theories,” Wolcott said. “One is smell, and the Italians, appropriately, are great partisans of the olfactory hypothesis.”
The idea is that the pigeons are mapping the sequence of smells as their handlers drive them out for a flight: “On the way to the release point you smell the odors as you go along, you pass olives, and then garlic, and then chocolate, the pines of Rome! You remember the sequence and they just go backwards,” he said.
Then there’s an idea that the birds are paying attention to the variations in magnetism, and they use these fluxes to build a map. So, odor and magnetism are the first two hypotheses: “The third is infrasound, very-low-frequency sound. Pigeons are sensitive to sounds down to one-tenth of one cycle per second. We [humans] quit at about twenty cycles per second. So pigeons are listening to these very low frequencies for reasons that we haven’t a clue [about].”
But birds have made it home even after scientists disrupted their sense of smell, or messed with the magnetism, or interfered with their hearing. Scientists have anesthetized the birds, and put them on rotating turntables in airtight chambers, and driven them to the release site. “Oh yes, yes,” Wolcott said. “We’ve done that. It doesn’t bother them. The wretched creatures have several mechanisms, and when you take one away the little stinkers switch to something else,” Wolcott said.
In his research Wolcott played the role of a James Bond villain, setting up impossible challenges, and inevitably the pigeons would dodge the alligators and flaming spikes without wrinkling their dinner jackets.
Pigeons have also, of course, played the role of unflappable government agents in real life. All those sensitive homing tools have allowed humans to put pigeons to use as instruments of communication, and they were particularly useful in war.
The most famous war pigeon is probably Cher Ami, who was trapped behind German lines with an American division during World War I. Back on the front lines, the US artillery, which had no clue the division was out there, was lobbing explosive shells onto American soldiers. The communications specialist for the trapped division released two pigeons. The Germans promptly shot them down. Then the Americans released Cher Ami, their last hope. Here’s how Rose Wilder Lane embellished the drama of that moment in 1919 for the Ladies’ Home Journal:
Flung upward, . . . into stinging, blinding pain. For hardly had his wings taken hold of the air when agony struck him, stopped him, pierced him through and through. He fluttered and fell, fluttered, caught at the air and reeled. “God!” said the haggard man in the shell hole below. “He’s done for.”
Convulsively the strong wings struck out again. Then they steadied and held the air. Cher Ami wavered, rose and wavered again. Then he vanished above the smoke. There was clear air around him. Beneath
him was such a world as he had never seen, a hideous world without meaning or purpose. Only his wings were the wings he had known, and they carried him around and around, in weary circles.
As he circled he heard a silent voice, a voice without words, that said: “Come!” “Come!” said the wordless message. “This is the right way. Follow it. Come!”
Every telling of this story I’ve read suffers from the same overindulgence in artistic license. It’s just so potently heroic that writers can’t help adding flourishes. Cher Ami made it back to the base in half an hour, but arrived missing an eye, and (aha!) a foot: The message canister on its leg was hanging by a few ligaments. But that was enough to save the soldiers. After Cher Ami died, a taxidermist preserved the body, and in doing so he found that Cher Ami was actually female—a transgender war hero. She’s now at the Smithsonian. Cher Ami is pretty scruffy. On the street, she would be indistinguishable from any other one-legged pigeon. Now that we no longer have a use for these birds, they’re considered bums. They’re not so different from the grimy man carrying a piece of cardboard on which he’s blocked out the words VETERAN, ANYTHING HELPS.
Carrier pigeons have gone out of fashion in the era of high-speed communication, but they may rise again. The Chinese military has trained ten thousand birds as a low-tech alternative in case their advanced communications technology is subverted or destroyed.
MYSTERY SOLVED
The mystery of mangled pigeon feet was maddeningly elusive. But finally, Haag-Wackernagle was able to supply a satisfying answer. I sent him the article that ran in The Stranger, which, he said, “contains a lot of nonsense but also the real reason: human hairs, fishing line, and other filaments get entangled, blood circulation stops, and necrosis leads to the loss of toes.” Other birds don’t have the same problem because they are better at removing hair with their beaks, whereas pigeons seem unable to rid themselves of the filaments. In addition, other birds hop while pigeons walk. Pigeons shuffle along in a way that makes them more likely to pick up strings than a skipping sparrow. The explanation is, in the end, quite simple, he said. Still, there is no end to speculation: “In Germany people believed that a mysterious person would hogtie pigeons,” he said.
Unseen City Page 4