I was walking in the park with a friend recently, when they pointed at a pigeon and told me I was looking at their favourite bird. I was incredulous. Pigeons? Those winged vermin? My friend responded with this twisted logic: it makes a lot of sense for pigeons to be your favourite bird, because you get to enjoy them all the time.
Temporarily bemused, I wondered if anyone could really be so enamoured with pigeons. Turns out, the joke’s on me. When I spoke to other friends and colleagues, a surprising number of them had a lot of love for the humble pidge. One New Scientist colleague, who will remain nameless, confessed to having a secret pigeon tattoo. I even saw a news report about .
As I read around a little, I found that pigeons do have a lot to recommend them. Aside from their well-known homing abilities, they are unassumingly intelligent. They are no mammal, but do produce a kind of milk. They kiss each other, applaud themselves after sex and can (and can remember the ones who are mean to them). Add all that together and maybe, I thought, I could learn to love this seemingly ordinary bird after all. So, armed with my curiosity and a bag of oats, I set out to do just that.
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A bit of bird-watching
I wanted to conduct my investigation with at least a whiff of scientific integrity, so I conceived of an “experiment”. First, I would go pigeon watching with no prior preparation. I would simply observe the birds and note the extent to which I enjoyed it. Then I would learn everything I could about pigeons. Finally, I would go pigeon watching again and see if my enjoyment of the activity increased. (I did only say “a whiff” of scientific integrity.)
On an overcast afternoon in July, I sat on the grass in London’s St James’s Park near a group of pigeons. I didn’t get too close, as I was half-worried about catching something from these birds (see “Will pigeons give me a disease?”, below). But I allowed myself to observe them properly for once. I found I could tell the slimmer females from the puffy-necked males, for instance, and I appreciated the iridescent band that shimmers around many of the birds’ necks. The odd pigeon had a wildly different colour of plumage to the rest, one a fetching white with cappuccino-coloured splodges. Just the act of slowing down and noticing the birds was nice – but I have to admit that no wild love erupted straight away.
To educate myself further, I got hold of excellent book . I quickly learned a lot of interesting facts, not least that the inventor Nikola Tesla lived with pigeons for years and was apparently besotted with one particular bird.
I also learned that pigeons were probably domesticated from wild rock doves in Egypt around 5000 years ago. The birds started to live around human settlements – something that continues today – and people began keeping them as pets and messengers, and bred them for food. We tend to use “dove” for the daintier, lighter-coloured birds and “pigeon” for the heavier, darker ones, but these differences have no real scientific meaning. The bird we call a pigeon is scientifically known as Columba livia, as is a rock dove.
Now that I knew more about what I was talking about, I began to dig into research on the inner lives of pigeons. Unbelievably, they seem to understand spelling. In a study from 2016, pigeons were presented with a screen showing a black star symbol and either a real or nonsense word. Using rewards, psychologists and neuroscientists aimed to train the pigeons to peck at the real words, and to peck at the star when the nonsense words were presented. The pigeons , on average, which isn’t bad. When baboons were given a similar test in a previous, separate study, they learned 139.
When pigeons dream
There is also some evidence that pigeons dream. In a 2023 study, researchers put sleeping pigeons into an functional MRI scanner and found that their brains entered a rapid eye movement phase, the sleep stage where dreams occur in people. The researchers also saw that some of the that lit up when the pigeons dreamed were also active when the animals were flying. I found it satisfying to think that humans dream about flying because they can’t do it – and pigeons do the same because they can.
Pigeons also feature in a long-running debate about culture and how unique it is to humans. One way to define culture is learned behaviours distinct to different groups. This was once thought to be uniquely human, but experiments have shown evidence of these learned differences in many other animals.
These days, instead of learned differences, something called cumulative cultural evolution is sometimes said to be a uniquely human trait. This is the way innovations build over generations, adding to a group’s collective knowledge and skills, to produce more complex technologies and learning. Take chimps, for instance, one of humans’ closest challengers in terms of intelligence. We know they have simple pieces of technology, such as using a pair of stones to crack nuts. But we believe that hasn’t changed for at least 4000 years. “They have this one invention, and it’s easy to pass on, but there haven’t really been any new innovations,” says at the University of Rochester in New York. “They’re basically stuck at very simple levels of technology.”
Pigeons, however, might be able to harness collective intelligence for innovation. We all know of pigeons’ homing abilities, but it turns out they are more special than you might think, as Biro found out somewhat by mistake. She had been working with pigeons to try to understand how they use landmarks to navigate. She would drive them miles and miles from her lab, release them and track their progress as they flew home. Many birds make epic migrations, but no others we know of can find their way home when released from a spot they have never visited before. Biro took the pigeons to the same place time and again and discovered that, after a few flights, they settle into a preferred route, usually about 90 per cent efficient – where perfect efficiency would be a straight line – that they stick to from then on, often using roads and rivers as a guide.
Then one day Biro accidentally released two pigeons at the same time. They flew home together, which was no surprise since pigeons like to stick together as a defence against predators. But when she analysed their path, she realised they took a compromise of their own preferred routes home. This gave her student They would pair a pigeon that had flown the route a few times with one that was completely naive. They would let them fly the route a few times, then remove the more experienced pigeon and replace it with another naive one. Doing this several times over is like simulating several generations of pigeons, says Biro, mimicking the flow of time in cultural evolution. They could also put a number on the degree of progress the pigeons made each trip, through their route efficiency.
Amazingly, the pigeons’ routes kept getting slightly “generation”. Biro sees this as one of the few examples of cumulative cultural evolution outside humans. And because the birds’ flight efficiency can be directly measured, the research has persuaded at least some other scientists that pigeons exhibit cumulative culture. “Pigeons are the purest example we know of at the moment,” says neuroscientist at the University of Bristol, UK, who has also studied pigeon intelligence.
We probably shouldn’t get too carried away about pigeons’ smarts, though, says biologist at Royal Holloway, University of London. One reason why we know so much about pigeons is because they are so easy to work with – and as such have been studied extensively. But many birds pull off impressive feats of navigation. Take Manx shearwaters, seabirds that live on islands in the North Atlantic. Those near Wales go off to feed in the Bay of Biscay (which borders France and Spain) for a day or two and then come back to their burrows. “That’s incredibly impressive navigation,” says Portugal – far more impressive than what pigeons do, he reckons.
That said, Portugal is in favour of my quest to develop an appreciation of pigeons, if only because so many people treat them so badly. “When something is numerous, people think it’s OK to treat an individual in a way that causes suffering,” he says. “And that’s what I don’t like.” He is referring to the way people put spikes or netting on buildings to stop the birds roosting; the netting often leads to the birds getting tangled up and dying.
Respect the pidge
After all this, I headed back to St James’s Park to commune with the pigeons again. I can’t claim that there was any grand epiphany. But where once I would have felt indifference or mild disgust, now there was respect. I placed some oat flakes on my palm and waited for a long time. Eventually, a pigeon hopped along and pecked them up. It was surprisingly gentle.
They're good lads, pigeons: humble, unassuming, but talented and intelligent
So had I learned to love pigeons? I think I would have to say yes. They are good lads, pigeons: humble, unassuming, but talented and intelligent, too. For the rest of this past year, I have appreciated them wherever I see them, which is more or less everywhere.
I wrote most of this story in the summer, so it was on my mind one day when I was at a country pub on holiday. As I sat down with my pint on a bench, a few tame sparrows landed on a wall next to me. I started observing them, noting their sharp movements and even snapping a photo of one as it took off, displaying its long, elegant flight feathers. “Aren’t sparrows amazing?” I said to myself.
I think I might have found my next story.
Will pigeons give me a disease?
Like any wild animal, pigeons do carry diseases and humans can catch some of them. That includes the bacterial infection psittacosis, among other things. However, you would have to be extremely unlucky to get infected just by being close to a pigeon or even touching one (though do wash your hands afterwards). What you want to avoid is inhaling dust from pigeons or their dried droppings. The best advice is to avoid spending time in an enclosed space with the birds.
