Pigeons

I usually claim the day I fully became a New Yorker as the day I swore at a pigeon that flew way too close to my head. My swearing wasn’t at the incident but instead a futile string of profanity directly targeted at the dumb pigeon. I don’t think the bird registered it. Pigeons are ubiquitous in cities and disparagingly called (including by me) “rats with wings.” But lately I found myself wondering: why are pigeons everywhere?

I’m not someone who knows a lot about animal habitats and distribution and all that, but the idea of a bird like a pigeon being prolific in all over the world felt… odd. It doesn’t have the wings to make a cross-ocean flight. Why would anyone bring a pest with them on a trip? Were they stowaways on ships?

Turns out, the answer is far simpler: They were messenger pigeons.

Homing pigeons were incredible. These pigeons were “trained to fly back and forth up to twice a day reliably, covering round-trip flights up to 160 km (100 mi).”^[1] In a day and age before the telegraph a messenger service like this was lightning fast. And they weren’t just used in the pre- and early-modern periods either — these birds were used thousands of years ago to “proclaim the winner of the Ancient Olympics.” They were later observed by Pliny the Elder, they were used by Genghis Khan, there was a network of them between medieval Baghdad and Syria.^[1] Pigeons were great. When people travelled to new places, they brought pigeons with them and so pigeons spread.

The pigeons we see in cities today are descendants of those homing pigeons. They’re discarded technology that fell by the wayside when the telegram and the telephone (especially the telephone) were introduced. Some pigeons escaped before, but others were later just… released. So pigeons did as pigeons do, made their lousy nests, and then one of them flew too close to my head some years ago.

But here’s the thing about pigeons, those rats-with-wings: Their proliferation is a holdover from humanity’s deep, deep desire to communicate despite distances. 160 km is a fair distance even today with cars and plans; to be able to share news that far within a day millennia ago must’ve felt like a luxurious miracle. People want to connect with each other, even if it’s just to share the news or find out how goes a military campaign. The telegram, the telephone, the internet. As the years go by we just keep getting better and better at finding ways to talk to each other. I can send a text message to my brother, I can call my mom, I can write this post for you to read.

That there are so many pigeons everywhere is a testament to humanity’s collective desire — collective need — to connect. Communication, conversation, and storytelling are all deeply ingrained in our species, so much so that thousands of years ago folks looked at pigeons and saw a way to communicate. The pigeons I’ve seen in New York and Los Angeles, London and Lisbon, Singapore and Tokyo are all there because people brought pigeons with them to stay in touch with others around them.  That’s probably one of the reasons I find generative AI being foisted on us by tech ghouls to be so sad. I want to hear your thoughts, the ones created by the unique way your brain synthesizes everything you’ve heard, read, and seen throughout your life. Replacing our blog posts and text messages and silly in game chats with what an unthinking, unfeeling algorithm calculated was the probable string of words is an insult to not only our humanity but populations of feral pigeons worldwide.