without taking a backwards somersault), priests, nuns, monks, archangels, etc., etc., were all artificial variations of one bird. The difference noticeable in the markings of street pigeons is a vestige of their earlier domestication. Because their feather-color patterns provide an external record of hereditary influences, and because they are docile and hardy, pigeons are a favorite laboratory animal of modern geneticists.
Pigeons are social, somewhat timid, strong, and monogamous. Once mated, they customarily stay so for life. The cock as well as the hen broods the eggs, the hen working all night, the cock relieving her around ten in the morning and mooching off at four in the afternoon. The same schedule applies to the feeding of the young; both sexes secrete “pigeon milk” in their crops. Before coition, at the bonbon stage of courtship, the male feeds a regurgitated substance to the female. Maeterlinck called
Columba livia
“the most sedentary, most homekeeping, most habit-ridden of bourgeois.” Fire will not budge a brooding pigeon. If a female leaves her nest before an egg has been laid, the male marches behind her, pecking at her head, until she returns or faints. A male will fight to the death defending the sanctity of his hearth. The nests are simple affairs—flat arrangements of twigs, feathers, straw, any old thing. The Museum of Natural History once possessed one made of paper clips; it was found near Wall Street. Are pigeons stupid? It is true that they will inadvertently trample their young to death in the nest; they carry only one twig at a time, whereas the sparrow carries two or three; and a pigeon will make romantic overtures to a bit of broken glass. But, pigeon boosters reply, pigeons have big feet and small fledglings; the sparrow makes a sloppy nest; and what’s wrong with looking in a mirror? Certainlythe bird is very eager to survive, unlike his cousin, the passenger pigeon, and his great-uncle once removed, the dodo.
New York City is a good town for pigeons. The health officials of London kill a third of the pigeon population each year. In 1945, Philadelphia started an anti-pigeon campaign, and it trapped twenty-six thousand birds before it admitted that pigeons are irrepressible. In 1930, the superintendent of the State Capitol in Albany poisoned a batch around the building, and the stirred legislators promptly passed the following law: “Pigeons shall not be killed within the limits of any city except for food purposes, or unless sick or injured beyond recovery.” The only major local violation of the statute occurred in 1937, when an unknown fiend, in two sessions (August 10th and November 17th), fed a hundred Broadway pigeons strychnine pellets. The uproar, including a
Times
editorial entitled “St. Francis Must Weep,” was huge. Building owners wage cold war against pigeons with spikes, prongs, metal netting, and lye-strewn or electrified ledges. The absence of filigrees, cornices, and other nook-rich ornamentation from the newer buildings is partly an anti-nesting device, though the pigeon theory of modern architecture should not be pursued to the exclusion of Frank Lloyd Wright. The bird’s main Manhattan enemy, strange to relate, is the duck hawk, who swoops from bridges and skyscrapers. When Dr. Harry Emerson Fosdick suggested that the predators nesting in the steeple of Riverside Church be wiped out, the city’s falcon lovers raised a strenuous outcry. Not quite as strenuous, though, as that which greeted Magistrate Anthony Burke, who in the same month (July, 1936) handed down the opinion that people who feed pigeons are morons. This hit a lot of citizens, for upward of fifty thousand pigeons live in Manhattan on handouts plus garbage. Pigeons cannot vote, and only five are in the phone book—two Edwins, two Georges, and one Pete.
Voices in the Biltmore
April 1956
E VER ON THE LOOKOUT for a feasible means of rejuvenation, we took ourself to the Biltmore Hotel one afternoon
Pigeons are social, somewhat timid, strong, and monogamous. Once mated, they customarily stay so for life. The cock as well as the hen broods the eggs, the hen working all night, the cock relieving her around ten in the morning and mooching off at four in the afternoon. The same schedule applies to the feeding of the young; both sexes secrete “pigeon milk” in their crops. Before coition, at the bonbon stage of courtship, the male feeds a regurgitated substance to the female. Maeterlinck called
Columba livia
“the most sedentary, most homekeeping, most habit-ridden of bourgeois.” Fire will not budge a brooding pigeon. If a female leaves her nest before an egg has been laid, the male marches behind her, pecking at her head, until she returns or faints. A male will fight to the death defending the sanctity of his hearth. The nests are simple affairs—flat arrangements of twigs, feathers, straw, any old thing. The Museum of Natural History once possessed one made of paper clips; it was found near Wall Street. Are pigeons stupid? It is true that they will inadvertently trample their young to death in the nest; they carry only one twig at a time, whereas the sparrow carries two or three; and a pigeon will make romantic overtures to a bit of broken glass. But, pigeon boosters reply, pigeons have big feet and small fledglings; the sparrow makes a sloppy nest; and what’s wrong with looking in a mirror? Certainlythe bird is very eager to survive, unlike his cousin, the passenger pigeon, and his great-uncle once removed, the dodo.
New York City is a good town for pigeons. The health officials of London kill a third of the pigeon population each year. In 1945, Philadelphia started an anti-pigeon campaign, and it trapped twenty-six thousand birds before it admitted that pigeons are irrepressible. In 1930, the superintendent of the State Capitol in Albany poisoned a batch around the building, and the stirred legislators promptly passed the following law: “Pigeons shall not be killed within the limits of any city except for food purposes, or unless sick or injured beyond recovery.” The only major local violation of the statute occurred in 1937, when an unknown fiend, in two sessions (August 10th and November 17th), fed a hundred Broadway pigeons strychnine pellets. The uproar, including a
Times
editorial entitled “St. Francis Must Weep,” was huge. Building owners wage cold war against pigeons with spikes, prongs, metal netting, and lye-strewn or electrified ledges. The absence of filigrees, cornices, and other nook-rich ornamentation from the newer buildings is partly an anti-nesting device, though the pigeon theory of modern architecture should not be pursued to the exclusion of Frank Lloyd Wright. The bird’s main Manhattan enemy, strange to relate, is the duck hawk, who swoops from bridges and skyscrapers. When Dr. Harry Emerson Fosdick suggested that the predators nesting in the steeple of Riverside Church be wiped out, the city’s falcon lovers raised a strenuous outcry. Not quite as strenuous, though, as that which greeted Magistrate Anthony Burke, who in the same month (July, 1936) handed down the opinion that people who feed pigeons are morons. This hit a lot of citizens, for upward of fifty thousand pigeons live in Manhattan on handouts plus garbage. Pigeons cannot vote, and only five are in the phone book—two Edwins, two Georges, and one Pete.
Voices in the Biltmore
April 1956
E VER ON THE LOOKOUT for a feasible means of rejuvenation, we took ourself to the Biltmore Hotel one afternoon
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