My crusade against the unfair dislike of urban animals starts in earnest with this post, which I dedicate to one of the animals most associated with cities: pigeons.
I like pigeons. A lot. They’re pretty, and they make nice sounds, and their love lives are fascinating to follow. Also, they leave little footprints in the cement of innumerable city blocks, literally marking the city as their own.
What’s remarkable about pigeons is their ability to integrate human structures into their daily lives. This isn’t unique to pigeons — we’ve all seen birds on telephone wires, or using bits of plastic in their nests. But pigeons don’t merely tolerate the artificial; they thrive on it.
It seems that many many many years ago (several thousand years ago, to be only slightly more specific), people in Mesopotamia decided they liked rock doves. This was mainly for two reasons: first, they tasted good; second, they could be used as messengers. So, the ancient Mesopotamians did what most humans do when they decide they like something — they domesticated them. This way, they had tame rock doves living in their cities, and both eating them and using them as messengers became much more easy than trying to capture them in the wild. These were the first pigeons as we know them today.
“Wait,” you might be thinking, “we were talking about doves a second ago, not pigeons.” Yes, well, they’re the same thing. There’s no real difference between the two, and the common pigeon we see flying around Times Square is simply a species (or technically subspecies) of dove. But humans like categorizing things almost as much as they like domesticating them, so we call the gray, striped, slightly iridescent doves that live in cities “pigeons,” and the white, motherly looking ones that hang out in trees “doves.” That’s the only distinction, and it’s a nebulous one.
Anyway, aside from the domestication itself, pigeons are naturally well-suited to cities, because their natural habitat is cliffs. They’re very good at taking off and landing nearly vertically, and they enjoy living in small alcoves in cliff faces. Which are remarkably well imitated by tall buildings with window ledges and fire escapes and cornices. In short, cities are the perfect habitat for many pigeons, as they are essentially artificial cliff collections filled with crumbs, dropped sandwiches, and other easy sources of food.
And these are some of the reasons why pigeons are so universal, at least in cities: we’ve increased their — if not natural, then domestic — habitat by so much that the whole Earth is now covered in places they enjoy living.
Obviously, cities are not flawless places for pigeons. The amount of pollution and smog present in most large cities can harm them, as can cars, trains, and trucks. Pigeon health (and urban wildlife health in general) can be an informal way of judging a city’s air quality. But of course, natural habitats also come with manifold risks, both living ones like predators and abiotic ones like wind and weather. So it isn’t surprising that pigeons are willing to accept the perils of urban life in exchange for the lifestyle’s relative comfort.
In short, pigeons inhabit our cities because we domesticated them and then built cities to be remarkably pigeon-friendly. It’s kind of interesting to think that places that were built by and for humans can end up being favorable for other animals. Especially at a time when we know how much destruction humans can cause, it’s comforting to think that, for at least a few animals, skyscrapers don’t represent the end of a home, but a new one.
For more pigeons facts, click here.