Little Pi, 10 days old.
When people say they hate pigeons, I want to ask them if they hate themselves, too. Does it prick the well of your loathing? Do they make you feel dirty and ashamed? …The pigeon was once a dove, and then we built our filthy empire up around it, came to hate it for simply thriving in the midst of our decay, came to hate it for not dying.
Pigeons are not perfect … But really, can you keep paying your taxes and directing your eyes at Gaza and feel any moral superiority to anyone or anything, ever?
Early in June my friend and neighbour, Paqui, with whom I share a long back balcony that’s divided between our two fourth-floor flats, told me that some okupas had taken over my side just where it adjoins hers with railing between us. I don’t go out there often, mainly just to hang out the washing. Home life is in the front side of the flat looking over the street rather than at my neighbours’ back balconies and their drying clothes (although we did have some good social life out there during the pandemic). Yes, there were two squatters. They’d made a nest in an old flowerpot. The word “made” might be exaggerated. They were occupying the flowerpot, sun blazing down on it, in plain sight of any predatory great black-backed gull. I’d never had pigeons nesting on my balcony before. I didn’t like pigeons. Yet these two were a comely pair. She was sitting in the flowerpot. He was on the balcony rail. Both of them were looking at me. Eye contact. It was something special. That was the start of my pigeon life.
Now I have to confess something. When I moved into this flat thirty years ago, I believed, like most people, that pigeons were flying rats. They were nesting in the cavities behind ventilation holes under the cornices of the modernist buildings in my Barcelona neighbourhood of El Born. Our front balconies were covered with pigeon droppings. You could smell it as soon as you opened the balcony doors in summer. I asked the city hall to block the holes giving access to their nests. Not interested. So, with another neighbour, Salva (I could write a book about Salva, who stowed away on a Canary Islands banana boat escaping his abusive father, when he was nine years old), I organised all the fourth-floor neighbours in our street to hang fine green netting down to cover the holes. It worked a treat with the pigeons but our elegant heritage building (1888) looked a sight. More interested in appearances than protecting us from the histoplasmosis and ornithosis (psittacosis) we feared we’d get, the city hall rushed to protect the defaced building. Green net was removed, holes blocked, and pigeon droppings ceased to be a problem. In fact, our chances of contracting some terrible pigeon vector disease changed very little as those stories are greatly exaggerated. Ask the National Audubon Society. But Salva and I didn’t know that back then. We were pretty pleased with ourselves. We’d had fun getting and hanging the netting, annoying the city hall, and we’d got rid of the pigeon droppings.
I wish Salva had been here to enjoy my next pigeon adventure. He would have loved it, but he died about ten years ago, one of the best people ever to walk the earth. Before the feathered okupas looked at me in that way, if anyone had said I’d come to love pigeons, I probably would have laughed. But it’s not a comment people tend to make. In the city we tend to ignore them, or shoo them away in the street, or look away in disgust if a gull is feasting on a pigeon corpse. But they looked at me like that, so I put up an umbrella to protect them from the sun, made a shield so the gulls couldn’t see them, and started leaving them food and water to splash in. I knew that the city hall criminalises feeding pigeons to the tune of 600 euros but, oh well, Paqui wasn’t going to tell on me. One problem was Jonas, my big black cat. I had to ban him from the back balcony. It wasn’t a big problem as he rarely goes out there. He’s a front balcony feline.
There were two eggs, but they kicked one aside. They took turns on their nest and Pa was always keeping watch when not incubating. They trusted me. When I changed their water and left out seed right next to them they weren’t afraid. I had the strangest sense we were communicating something, somehow, and it was a nice feeling. I started looking at them carefully and realised that they’re beautiful birds, loving with each other, and very conscientious about their nesting. Ma was sitting a bit higher one day and I realised baby must have hatched. The next day she moved and perched on the edge of the pot. I’m sure she wanted to show me her baby. My friends started getting fascinated too. I was giving pigeon tours. They asked what the baby’s name was but I thought that, since they’re feral birds, it was better not to give a name. Then I thought again. At the time, I was translating a fantastic book of nineteenth-century political philosophy, Las Nacionalidades, by the Catalan politician Francesc Pi i Margall, and my friend, CounterPunch writer Richard Schulman wrote something about Πr2, and I love coincidences, so baby became Little Pi.
The first thing I noticed about Little Pi, apart from the always bulging crop was the intelligence and curiosity in his dark eyes (male gender was a guess, but time showed that, yes, Little Pi is a he). Every time I went outside he tried to stand up to greet me (I believed), staring at me with those big eyes, totally unafraid. Ma and Pa were always nearby, also unafraid. But when Little Pi started sprouting feathers, becoming an adolescent, he became more reserved. I was sad but I guess he had to learn the bad news about humans. The morning he fledged, I went out early to find Ma and Pa very agitated on the balcony and no Little Pi. Then I saw him, on an opposite balcony railing, looking much more serene that his parents. For a few days, the three of them roosted together on my balcony. Then, not long after Ma and Pa went off to roost somewhere else, little Pi turned up with a young female, Margall (in Catalan, mərˈɣaʎ but pronounced My Girl on my back balcony), the two of them still with strands of yellow baby fluff. They were constantly rubbing beaks and heads together and snuggling up. One sweltering night, I opened the back balcony door to let a bit of air through the flat. Jonas went outside. Although Jonas is a very relaxed cat and never catches anything more than mosquitos, he must have conveyed some cattish quality that scared them and they’ve never been back since. I miss them a lot. They brought gentleness, trust, and innocence to my back balcony when, in my study next to the front balcony, I was reading about genocide every day. But they weren’t an escape from genocide as I first imagined. They were teaching me things about genocide, about humans who commit this horrific crime.
Little Pi, left, and My Girl, right, early August.
This sweet pigeon behaviour has quite a lot to do with their name. Feral city pigeons are close relatives of the rock dove. Basically, the smaller species are “doves” and the larger birds “pigeons”. In scientific terms, they are both of the Columbidae family. “Dove” originally applied to all the Columbidae which, in the earliest civilisation of Mesopotamia, were domesticated as a source of food, eggs and meat. Their high fertility rate as many as five two-egg clutches per year, their monogamous, nurturing, affectionate nature clearly didn’t go unnoticed as the goddesses of love and fertility, Ishtar, Venus, Atargatis, and Aphrodite, are all represented by doves. The Hindu goddess of erotic love Kamadeva rides on the back of a pigeon. A dove holding an olive branch represents Athene in her aspect as renewer of life. The name of the Seven Pleiades (Greek: Πελειάδες, “doves”), or the Seven Mothers of the World, is thought to be related with the Semitic perah Ištar (bird of Ishtar), and Aphrodite took on Inanna-Ishtar’s associations with sexuality and procreation. It was a dove that took the olive branch to Noah’s arc, telling him that the flood had receded, a dove that whispered in the Prophet Muhammad’s ear, and the Holy Spirit chose to become a dove when he impregnated the Virgin Mary.
But doves are pigeons. “Dove” (dufa, in Old Norse) has Saxon and Norse roots. In Old French, pijon denoted a young peeping bird, especially a dove. In English, the bird got linguistically split after the Norman invasion and French became the language of court. Doves were turned into pigeons. In a sense, they’re the reverse story of the ancient texts edited out of the Book of Genesis about the transformation of the first woman God supposedly created, the wilful Lilith who ended up copulating with demons on the shores of the Red Sea, into the Virgin who was so pure she had to be impregnated by a white dove. This transformation from hypersexuality to hyper-imagined chastity is the other side of the coin where the pure dove, symbol of good fertility (representing the divine) becomes dirty vermin shamelessly copulating in “our” streets.
How come pigeons get such a bad rap after their glorious dove past? In the city, we have the dove’s name given to Unilever’s sweet-smelling, pure white soap (and its “real beauty” Self Esteem Project) versus the darker, “flying rat”, the divine dove versus the pestilential pigeon. But doves didn’t turn into vermin just because someone changed their name. I agree with Donna Haraway when she writes in Staying with the Trouble, “It matters what matters we use to think other matters with; it matters what stories we tell other stories with … It matters what stories make worlds, what worlds make stories”. The way we think about and therefore treat pigeons is a symptom of many of the ills of today’s world. Prejudice is rampant. A grey pigeon isn’t a white dove, so it’s a dirty shitty thing. It’s not such a big mental step in the “matters we use to think other matters with” to the “final solution” of sterile cleanliness: genocide. A dark-skinned immigrant just landed on a leaky boat isn’t a white guy in a suit and tie. Palestinians, West Papuans and, before them, Rwandans are all turned into vermin, cockroaches, or cancer because that’s what’s said about them, and they must die because of that. Or they die the social death of being made invisible. Just look at the famous photo of golfers in their whites ignoring black asylum seekers stuck on a razor wire fence keeping them off, banning them from the perfectly manicured imitation-nature green.
The feral city pigeon got dirtier as the twentieth-century city became more hygienist. Things were separated. As Colin Jerolmack puts it “the city is the place where we can invite nature in ways we can control”. We can control a big, bright, shiny billboard advertising pure, white, nice-smelling Dove soap (while the disgusting effects in rainforests of its production are hidden away) but we can’t control the messy, dark-feathered, space-invading pigeons which break the boundaries of a place where nature doesn’t belong. A pigeon’s not just a pigeon but a sign of the human-caused rot of “progress”. It represents not just the real poverty of other street dwellers, but poverty of the Manichaean human imagination. “Invasive” species get decimated, although the question of which species is invasive gets back to the “stories we tell other stories with” when members of only one species, the most invasive of all, are calling other species invasive, are calling members of its own species invasive. Who feeds pigeons in the city? Many pigeon feeders are social outcasts, the old, lonely, homeless, dirty, made-invisible, unwanted, socially embarrassing people, the humans seen, or often unseen, in the way pigeons are. Feeding pigeons is widely criminalised. They’re shot, exterminated en masse, trapped, poisoned, subjected to birth control, and exposed to all kinds of repellents like deterrent spikes in places where they like to perch, and (mea culpa) blocked nesting holes. Some humans do these things, officially and legally, to other humans.
When not being called dirty, pigeons are denigrated as dumb, like the humans that are called bird-brained. Like most slurs, this one says more about users than targets. Pigeons aren’t simply objects to be acted on, for example to be turned into the famous highly effective wartime messengers for humans. They have their own agency and are highly intelligent in ways humans sometimes aren’t. For starters, they are 99% accurate when distinguishing between healthy and cancerous tissue in X-rays and microscope slides; they can discriminate between paintings by Monet and Picasso; they can recognise letters of the alphabet and sometimes dozens of words, and can even spot spelling mistakes; they know human faces; and they can learn abstract rules about numbers. Like their beauty, which you only see if you learn how to look at them, their contributions to their surroundings are usually ignored. They eat large amounts of refuse; contribute to plant pollination; are being studied for the health benefits of their highly nutritious crop “milk” (a sloughing of epithelial cells from the crop lining) produced by both males and females to feed their squabs; are agreeable, soothing companions for many people, from young children to society’s human refuse. For example, for the brilliant scientist Nikola Tesla, the love of his life was a pigeon: “As long as I had her, there was a purpose to my life”. As I discovered for myself, pigeons are teachers for anyone who wants to understand how we humans relate with nature, which includes how we relate with each other.
Sharing space with pigeons isn’t just a matter of us and animals. Jacques Derrida suggests that humans use the word “animal” to separate ourselves from what we consider inhuman, thus creating a harsh rupture between us and them. In his 1980 essay “Why Look at Animals”, John Berger writes, “animals are always the observed”, objects of observation, denied any ability to observe and interact with humans, basically because they’re there to be exploited. As early as 1524, the revolutionary German theologian Thomas Müntzer was on to this in his Sermon to the Princes: “Behold, the basic source of usury, theft, and robbery is our lords and princes, who take all creatures for their private property. The fish in the water, the birds in the air, the animals of the earth must all be their property.” But if you share a gaze with a pigeon, you start breaking down the hard limits of what’s supposed to be human. In Nature, Culture and Gender, anthropologist Marilyn Strathern argues that the nature/culture binary is a “useless” analytical concept and it also has real-life ramifications in relations among humans. Western culture, regulated by, dominated by human thought and technology—and the men that control it—is valued as superior to unregulated nature. So women, who are seen as inferior and needing to be controlled, are linked with nature, and men with “culture”. Strathern shows that non-western peoples don’t understand the world like this. It’s yet another western concept of domination, as crude as phrenology as a measure of mental activity.
The nature/culture divide may be a useless analytical tool but it’s a powerful mechanism of exploitation which, I would argue, underlies the present horrors of ecocide and genocide. Like evolutionary biologist Lynn Margulis, Strathern understands the world in terms of connections or symbiosis. Breaking the real connections between humans and other animals is an absurd (but no less cruel for that) excuse for exploiting animals (which, in the end, includes other humans that are given undesirable animal qualities). To return to my back balcony okupas, the interrelations between humans and pigeons hold out new understandings of being in the world, and the relationships between ourselves and others, in an epoch when humans are busy killing a huge part of life on earth. And each other.
Breaking the human/animal (nature/culture) divide, becoming the animal we actually are (and seem so afraid of being) doesn’t require any physical transformation or imitation. It’s about challenging divisive dichotomies and moving away from imposed conceptions and identities of “human”. As Haraway writes, “Staying with the trouble means making oddkin; that is, we require each other in unexpected collaborations and combinations, in hot compost piles”. We need each other. There’s another dimension to all this: the moral one and, to use a word that doesn’t appear much in political or philosophical writing, the dimension of love. Iris Murdoch’s concern connects with Haraway’s idea that, “It matters what stories make worlds, what worlds make stories”. For Murdoch, the way we see the world is the bedrock of moral life so thinking about others in a hostile way will have consequences, even if not always visible. She argues that love lets us discover others: “Love is the perception of individuals. Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real. Love … is the discovery of reality.” Thanks to Ma, Pa, Little Pi, and My Girl, I became a pigeon lover. They showed me something of their reality and made me think. I’m hoping that soon there’ll be a new nest on my back balcony and that they can teach me more.
