What do Nikola Tesla, Mike Tyson, Charles Darwin, Elvis Presley, and Murizzo Gucci have in common?
Pigeons—They all loved and kept pigeons.
Oatmail
Welcome to Oatmail, the Environ-Mental Health blog about nature's design to help you un-learn and re-learn how to be human from the species we share space with. I hope that my words will help you develop coping mechanisms to be well in today’s climate-changed world and the sustenance to grow a better tomorrow.
Today’s lesson: attention to detail. Pigeons bear a bad reputation as invasive pests and disease-bearing “rats with wings,” but we miss out on a wealth of transformative information when we confine this species to the dirtier aspects of their identity.
Rock Dove
The common breed of pigeon that we see in cities is the rock dove, perhaps named for their oceanic and dumortierite shades that, from further distances, merge to the gray of a sedimentary rock. Or their name could be due to the fact that before being domesticated by humans, pigeons were cliff-dwellers and made homes hidden inside of rock faces' pores.
The name suits humans’ notion of pigeons as forgettable backdrops to our busy city lives. For instance, the first time and rare occasion that I got close enough to pigeons to notice that their grays are softened by a subtle blue was when I was younger and my mom took me to eat a snack while running errands. For a few minutes, I stopped looking at everything around me and sat down on an iron-wrought chair that brought me more level with the concrete below me. Two pigeons stuttered through a paired dance circling closer to the crumbs I’d spilled. Their heads jolted asynchronously in what I thought was simple-minded or “bird-brained,” but actually this behavior revealed what I now know is an evolutionary strategy called “thrust and hold” (thrusting the head forward to first inspect the surroundings before catching up with the rest of the body).
From this proximity, the pigeons were no longer fixtures of the sidewalk that they spotted in poop but animated beings. Every move that the pigeons made rotated their crowns’ interlocking feathers to project iridescence through a unique angle. The royal teals and purples clicked together like clockwork and colored a radiant splash of feathers. The oranges of their eyes unnerved me.
I allowed the pigeons a few minutes of my attention to display their geodes glinting in the sunlight. Then I threw away the bag that had held my glazed scone and got back into the car for the ride home.
Evaluating Pigeons
Beauty doesn’t change the fact that pigeons live on the ground and eat whatever we reject. If we don’t notice pigeons’ beauty, it holds no more value than trash to us. What we instead recognize as valuable is often heuristic and almost arbitrary.
As an example, the only factors differentiating pigeons from doves are what we call them and how they look. Consequently, we tolerate pigeons as we do the scum of the street but write songs about mourning doves’ coos and release white doves at weddings as symbols of eternal love. As Hannah Waters writes for the Audubon News, “we afford the dove some grandeur while the pigeon is relegated to the trash bin.”
The more attention we pay to minutiae, the more that each subject magnifies in scope to increase our understanding and value of it, thus growing our appreciation for the living world and all of its details. For years, I thought that pigeons couldn’t walk well because this was the most convenient explanation for the bobbing behavior I observed. The time that it took me to read one sentence produced by a body of work from expert naturalists provided an alternative to my judgment, opened me to a world of cunning biomechanics, and made me wonder what else I was missing.
Aesthetics only brush the surface of the pigeons’ value composed of more details than there are facets in diamonds. A bit more time spent watching the pigeon might have hinted to me of the universe of cognition beneath its iridescent crown that is in many ways comparable or superior to our own.
Intelligence in Cognition
Studies have revealed that pigeons possess astounding cognition despite having brains no bigger than fingertips. Pigeons are one of six known species to pass the mirror test of self-recognition in which animals use visual cues from a mirror to investigate a foreign marker on their body.
Success bears a range of implications for self-awareness typically reserved for humans, and more wondrous feats of acute pattern recognition, distinction, and evaluation in the external environment further hint what might be transpiring in the pigeons’ internal worlds. These birds distinguish between faces in pictures, letters in the alphabet, words from nonsense, famous artists’ paintings, and even benign from cancerous tumours in scans as often and accurately as physicians can. Studies that require pigeons to judge digital lines displayed at various lengths and durations raise the question of whether their intelligence extends so far as to theoretically comprehend notions of space and time.
Vibrancy in Detail
In addition to cognition, pigeons’ sensory systems display a level of refinement and awe that is reminiscent of art. Visually, pigeons see a color spectrum broader than ours that includes ultraviolet shades. This ability allows pigeons to locate the reds and yellows of life preservers as well as ultraviolet light surrounding humans before we can during search and rescue missions at sea. Storms emit low frequency sound waves that pigeons detect before our meteorological radars do. And although the verdict is still out, unparalleled olfaction might be the reason behind the navigational skills that have caused us to use pigeons as couriers for thousands of years. A primary theory is that pigeons identify geography based upon different atmospheric smells to make their way home, although memory, magnetism, and visual or social cues have also been investigated. The explanation behind pigeons’ navigation is most likely a combination of multiple processes at work.
The Value of Noticing
These pigeon facts and so many more have delighted me over the past week, and I would have never known about them if I didn’t take the time to find them. I feel excited to live in a world where mysteries walk and fly around me, and where we will never run out of questions to answer.
This newly acquired knowledge also saddens me because the only reason that we know so much about pigeons today is because they were so obviously useful to our ancestors that they have been domesticated to our advantage. We cared to learn because pigeons were convenient to us. And still, though their value covers the breadth of human history and continues to inform us about our cognition and communication, we mainly associate pigeons with poop.
Our selective attention, or sweeping ignorance, is increasingly rewarded as technology races to the apex of human efficiency. Meanwhile, I fear that we do not fully comprehend the cost we give up. As we isolate the goals that take the least effort to focus on, the discarded details are the ones that not only make life possible, but worth it.
I desire a future in which we value species and their wonders separate from self-serving motives. In this future, we acknowledge the pigeons and the people around us more holistically. We take the time to sift through dirt because we value the labor as well as the shining reward that our efforts might uncover. In this future, maybe I am allowed and allow myself to spend a day with the pigeons at the park to discover what details I might learn.
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More Pigeon Culture:
Big Bang: pigeons were there when we heard some of the first conclusive evidence for the Big Bang Theory. Scientists in Holmdel in 1964 didn’t know why their antenna had persistent background static and spent hours cleaning pigeon excrement out of the horn. They even mailed the pigeons overseas in an effort to get rid of the noise that proved to be cosmic microwave radiation, the remnants of the Big Bang.
War Heroes: Pigeons served in the trenches of World War I and II by carrying messages between soldiers that resulted in saving tens of thousands of lives and earning medals of honor.
Pigeon-Gram: Pigeons were the workforce for the official mail service throughout New Zealand and to Australia
Nike: Pigeons featured on the Nike SB Pigeon Dunk shoe
Celebrities: Harm to his pigeons caused Mike Tyson’s first fight. Nikola Tesla was inconsolable after his pigeon died. Gucci kept pigeons, and Darwin dedicated 2 chapters of his book to pigeons although dogs and cats had to share 1. Picasso grew up around pigeons, learned to paint using pigeons, and named his daughter after pigeons.
Wall Street: Since pigeons can fly up to 92 miles per hour, they delivered the most expedient stock market news when investing on Wall Street began.
Martha Washington: At one time passenger pigeons made up 40% of U.S. birds but went extinct in 1914. The last known passenger pigeon was named Martha after Martha Washington.
Pigeon Racing: The most expensive pigeon was a Belgian breed that sold for $1.8 million for racing
Links:
FactsRide; Pigeon Facts
Pigeonpedia; Pigeon Facts
LA County.gov; Pigeons
Audobon News; We should definitely call pigeons rock doves again
Gizmodo; Why do pigeons’ throats shine so iridescently?
UCDavis; Common pigeons
The Conversation; How do pigeons navigate?
Atlas Obscura; Holmdel Horn Antenna
Mental Floss; Facts About Pigeons
Pigeon Control Resource Center; About Pigeons
One Kind Planet; Amazing Facts About Pigeons
APA; What can birds teach us about human cognition?
CGTN News; The World’s Most Expensive Pigeon
Smithsonian; The Passenger Pigeon
Stanford; Solar Weather
Culture Trip; The intriguing history of an artist’s muse
Let’s call them rock doves again