Pigeon courtship in the big, mean city

Even maligned birds deserve love!

A while back I watched a failed mating attempt between a couple of pigeons while waiting for the Brown Line in the Chicago Loop. An iridescent gray male puffed himself up a couple times and gave chase. At first, it seemed to work. The female pigeon—a real stunner with speckled brown and white feathers—let him zoom after her a few times. Then when he seemingly took things to the next level by flapping his wings to make a move, she wandered away toward a puddle, and that was that.

A few people looked on with mild amusement. One guy scuttled away in disgust when the pursuit got a little too close to where he was standing. All I kept thinking was, this is no way to romance someone. But let’s face it; pigeons don’t get much love in general.

When my sister and I were little, my mom used to tell us to stay away from pigeons. “They’ll make you go blind!” she’d warn in an all-knowing tone, shooing them away with a free hand. OK yikes, message received!

When I asked her about it years later, she said she remembered reading somewhere that something in their poop could cause blindness in humans. Then when she went hunting for the supposed mounds of evidence trumpeting the well-documented dangers of pigeon shit, all she could find was a single article on some site called Mother Earth News, which we decided was suspect on name alone. But for a mom of two little girls running amok, the soundness of this claim probably mattered less than the small modicum of control it afforded her whenever the maligned birds were near.

For much of my young life, I parroted her warning, always with satisfyingly aghast responses. Then one time I dutifully told my then boyfriend (now husband) Sean to keep away from some nearby pigeons. “They’ll make you go blind!” I hissed.

“Where’d you hear that from?” he asked, to which I huffily replied that my mom told me so. “But where did she get that information?” he prodded, which promptly blew the whole thing open. (Isn’t it wonderful to dig up the gems we hang onto since childhood without thinking to question them?)

In the years since the Great Blindness Myth Bust, I’ve developed a soft spot for pigeons, not so much out of guilt but more because they’re the most reliable form of nature we city dwellers stumble across in day-to-day life — aside from rats and squirrels, of course, which neatly round out the Maligned Big Three.

Feral city pigeons are descended from escaped domesticated birds, which are, in turn, descendants of the rock pigeon or dove. Rock pigeons were the first birds to be domesticated by humans, some 6,000 years ago in the Middle East. In the millennia since, they’ve provided us with food, entertainment, communication via message-carrying, aerial photography in wartime, and even the occasional breakthrough in medicinal research.

The main reason pigeons live and thrive in urban areas is because they’ve evolved to depend on the built, human environment to survive. There’s a beautiful sentence from BBC Wildlife Magazine on why cities suit pigeons well as a habitat: “Buildings are perfect nest sites for these exiles, mimicking the windswept cliffs used by their ancestors,” writes Steve Harris in the aptly titled piece, “Feral pigeon: flying rat or urban hero?”

Indeed, pigeons hang out on our window sills and fire escapes and live off our food waste, charging after our discarded, congealed pizza slices and overturned chow mein like the last coveted bar stool at Gibson’s Steakhouse on a Friday after work. They—sometimes successfully!—fuck on our subway platforms and sleep in little packs above us at the L stations, probably not threatening us with vision loss every time they poop.

A meme started floating around a few years ago about how pigeons build really lazy nests, composed of little more than a few sticks arranged in a haphazard pile. People liked that it was a middle finger (talon) to other birds, and a free pass for every underachiever: Just remember what a pigeon considers a “successful” nest! I read that they don’t always build crappy nests; mainly they do as little as they need to in order to get by.

I guess this means they’re not too concerned with finding the ideal conditions for courtship ambiance either. Now if that’s not bona-fide city dweller attitude, I don’t know what is.

From Sad and Useless