Perhaps it's the spiritual influence of the Muppet Bert, but pigeons fascinate me. Not in the same way as crows. Crows are intelligent birds that visit us now and then. Pigeons don't seem to be as smart, but they're a constant feature of city life. They fly low among us, walk on the street, eat what's available. You can't touch them unless they're domestic, but you can get very close. Somehow they've evolved to live amongst humans, who can be a very dangerous species, while maintaining they're own peculiar social life.
Book post coming soon. I just need to get a little further into the book.
2 comments:
I think pigeons are quite sweet, although I know a lot of people are disgusted by them and call them 'flying rats'. Some neighbors told us there was a major poisoning effort that went on here a few years ago that saw the poor things dropping out of the sky (yes, we told them about Tom Lehrer). Every other week or so I dry out the remains of our pita breads and turn them into pigeon chips. The birds always seem happy to have them - starlings too.
I'd read somewhere or other that pigeons are actually quite intelligent. Since I couldn't remember where that was I looked up 'pigeon intelligence' and found a wikipedia article that mentioned among other things that some scientists had determined pigeons can tell the difference between paintings done by Picasso and Monet. They won an Ig Nobel Prize that year.
Rats can be sweet too, of course, in the right context. It's just that when humans come in contact with non-domesticated rats (or mice) the conditions for both tend to be less than ideal. But yes, pigeons do seem to have sweet temperaments. I bet the pita chips make them happy.
Interesting news that they're more intelligent than we thought. I guess the fact that their heads are so much smaller than their bodies threw me off. That and the growing scientific consensus that dodos were basically flightless pigeons. Of course the dodo's problem had more to do with being flightless and thus unable to evade newly introduced predators than it did with intelligence. And hey, it turns out they're art historians too!
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