Feral Pigeons: Notes From a Blog Post I Never Got Around to Writing

  • Went bicycling looking for killdeer. Found one, but in the process also saw more than a hundred pigeons. (I counted. Somewhere I wrote down the number. It was something like 167, but when the subject is counting pigeons, you shouldn’t trust three-digit accuracy.)
  • There’s a great book about feral pigeons, called Feral Pigeons. Google books has it.
  • Pigeons do well in cities in part because they’re cliff-dwelling creatures. We build artificial cliffs for them.
  • Feral pigeons arrived in North America circa 1606 in Nova Scotia and Virginia.
  • Darwin wrote about pigeons.
  • Pigeons are the Warren Buffetts of birds. What they do looks absolutely ordinary, yet they do it with a spectacular success that is unmatched.
  • My sister, Lisa, hates pigeons.

In a perfect world, I’d have the time to sketch out a path through story space that touches all those bases, but I’m off to bed, so I’ll let you imagine the line of argument I might use.

pigeon

pigeon

One Comment

  1. Is it just me, or are there way, way more pigeons in Albuquerque than, say, 6 months ago?

    There’s a young Cooper’s hawk that hangs out near our house, and I’ve seen it dining on pigeons. Kind of cool – sounds cheesy, but it’s neat to see nature in action.

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