By Rose Brookfield
My flatmate fell in love with a pigeon while living alone in Scotland. A wood pigeon she named Pidge, who she fattened up on feed. The bird would arrive promptly every day at dusk to wait for its evening meal. It even brought a mate named Nemesis, and together, the two pigeons started a family. While I share my flatmate’s admiration for the bird, I do not find pigeons cute. What I like about pigeons is they make me feel nostalgic. They remind me of London, where I was born and raised. No matter where I am, there is always a pigeon to remind me of home. ‘After years of wandering,’ Jon Day once wrote on Charles Darwin, ‘his pigeons rooted him, with his family, in domestic life.’
The common pigeon is descended from Columbus livia, the rock dove. It thrives in our urban cityscapes because tall buildings mimic the cliff faces the rock doves first called home. Dogs co-evolved with humans. Wolves dined on human waste and, cleverly, realised that they could use humankind to their advantage. Pigeons, on the other hand, were bred by humans to display certain characteristics that would make them easy to handle, keep and train. Humans softened the pigeon, breeding out its aggressive tendencies so that they could share loft space without pecking each other to death. It was this intentional loss of territorialism that allowed the pigeon to thrive in urban spaces.
One of the main reasons why we dislike pigeons is that they are said to carry diseases. Fanciers often contract ‘pigeon lung’ from inhaling avian proteins found in bird droppings. Billie Marten sums up the malaise of the city dweller: ‘I am sick of branding and one-legged pigeons’. Greasy, hobbling, grey pigeons are eyesores. Interestingly, the bird was commonly consumed until their public reputation was damaged, and they were labelled unclean.
They are victims of the ‘Pigeon Paradox’. According to ecologist Robert R Dunn, the theory is humans despise the animal they see most frequently. Pigeons, writes Jon Day, are ‘synanthropes: creatures that live alongside rather than apart from us, thriving in the environments human beings have created for themselves’. Which is precisely why we hate the pigeon. They are interstitial creatures with one claw in the natural world and one in the other, the human world of culture. To see an animal that defies domestication engenders disgust. A pigeon in the domestic space is a threat, much like a rat crawling out of your toilet bowl from the sewer.
Pigeons were not always a threat. In the late nineteenth century, the English sparrow was labelled a ‘menace to the American ecosystem’, regarded as a ‘dirty, useless immigrant’ that was ordered by the US government to be eliminated. The language used to frame the sparrow as a threat is key to understanding the downfall of the pigeon. In a matter of decades, the problematic sparrow had largely been forgotten and replaced by the pigeon.
After World War Two, street pigeon populations began to thrive in cities because of an abundance of waste and the enthusiasm of pigeon feeders. The Swiss city of Basel recorded 20,000 street pigeons. Government officials saw the influx of birds as a serious problem. Public officials were worried about pigeon-borne diseases that are transmittable to both humans and domestic animals and, more importantly for them, their droppings damaging monuments and buildings. Basel encountered a problem — they found it was near impossible to cull the pigeon population. Pigeons are incredibly adaptable creatures. Their ancestors roosted in the cracks of cliffs, which in a city environment makes anti-pigeon spikes an easy obstacle to overcome. Trapping, shooting, and poisoning birds did little to affect the population. Killing adults merely enabled younger pigeons to thrive. The gestation time for pigeon eggs is only eighteen days. The government realised that the only way to rid themselves of pigeons was to starve them and the biggest feeders of pigeons were the people of Basel themselves. Basel had more than a pigeon problem, it had a marketing one.
In Disney's 1964 film Mary Poppins, Julie Andrews calls upon the children to ‘listen, listen, she's calling to you/ Feed the birds. Tuppence a bag’. Andrews is urging young Michael not to give his tuppence to the bank but to use it for an act of kindness. In this post-war context, homing pigeons were heroic creatures. Pigeon fanciers across the UK gave their birds to aid the war effort. Over 250,000 homing pigeons were used throughout the war and birds of prey were purposefully culled to make their flights safer. One pigeon named White Vision was awarded the Dickin Medal for ‘conspicuous gallantry and devotion to duty’ after it delivered a message under terrible conditions that saved an RAF aircrew.
In a society stricken by grief and loss after war, the act of tossing bread to a bird is an act of compassion. Basel had to change the hearts and minds of its people. Pigeons had to become pests. Basel set up a campaign against pigeons which worked so well that citizens began informing the local authorities if they spied on their neighbour feeding the birds. In one instance, a vigilante physically attacked a pigeon feeder for throwing crumbs. The turning point for pigeons came in 1966 when Thomas P Hoving, New York City Park Commissioner, made a speech in which he lamented the ‘winos’, ‘homosexuals’, ‘vandalism’, ‘litter’ and, worst of all, pigeons polluting Bryant Park. Hoving detonated the pigeon with his final remark in which he referred to them not as birds but ‘rat with wings’. Sociologist Colin Jerolmack, in ‘The cultural-spatial logic of problem animals’ notes that the demonisation of the bird reflects a wider ‘cultural anxiety about disorder and a deeply felt need for a sanitised city’. That the New York City Park Commissioner would blame the problems of his city on alcoholics, queer people, human rubbish and ‘rats with wings’ reflects a far more sinister bent to this sanitisation of society.
Yet in 2025, the pigeon is back. Artist Iván Argote, has erected an 18-foot statue of a pigeon on New York City's High Line. J W Anderson acknowledged the pigeon’s evolutionary genius when he proclaimed ‘they really are the most successful bird' to announce his new product: the pigeon clutch.
Perhaps the rebranding of the pigeon reflects a wider social trend: the righting of the social scale, the rise of the working class everyman. Blur's 1994 hit, Park Life was dubbed a working-class anthem because it celebrated the ‘dirty pigeons’ and ‘all the people’. Damon Alban sings ‘I feed the pigeons, I sometimes feed the sparrows too/ it gives me a sense of enormous well being’. Blur's lyrics are a twentieth century version of Julie Andrews: ‘come feed the birds, show them you care/ And you'll be glad if you do’.
The aestheticisation of the common pigeon reflects a trend for reclaiming that which has previously been the victim of snobbery. Take, for instance, Norman's Café located in Archway, North London, an eating institution that serves up the yassified version of the greasy spoon. The decline of the ‘caff’ has been documented by Issac Rangaswami in his popular Instagram account @caffs_not_cafes. The caffs that Rangaswami pays homage to are a far cry from the eleven-pound bacon, sausage, egg, beans, hash-brown, and toast served at Norman’s. In fact, Norman’s was so palatable Burberry took it over to advertise their SS24 collection. Some dubbed the move as the ‘aestheticisation of the working class’.
Jon Day describes the pigeon as ultimately untameable. Yet our current moment celebrates the chaotic. In 2023, ‘Rat Girl Summer’ trended on TikTok. The criteria for the movement according to the Washington Post included, ‘scurrying around the streets at all hours of the day and night, snacking to your heart's delight, and going to the place you have no business going to’; activities that back in 1964 were decried by Thomas P Hoving. Rat Girl was quickly replaced by BRAT, which took off from Charli XCX's album. To be BRAT means to be confident, rebellious, playful, and defiant.
Is it a coincidence that the pigeon is having its moment while the current cultural trend is to act like the common pigeon: unapologetic on the streets, defying public scrutiny and acting like a boss-ass bird?
ROSE BROOKFIELD reads for an MSt in Creative Writing at Regents Park College. She works at a market garden and is writing her first book about her chaotic attempts to become a farmer.
Art by Poppy Williams
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