Pigeons

The fanatical hatred of pigeons is actually a relatively new phenomenon. Far from being reviled, pigeons have been revered for thousands of years. After all, whom do we celebrate as Noah’s most loyal passenger if not the white dove bearing an olive branch and bringing hope? (“Pigeon” is merely a French translation of the English “dove.”)

It was a pigeon that delivered the results of the first Olympics in 776 B.C. and a pigeon that first brought news of Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo over twenty-five hundred years later;

Pigeons are athletes of the highest caliber. While racehorses receive all the glory, with their 35 mph sprints around a one-mile racetrack, homing pigeons—a mere pound of flesh and feathers—routinely fly over five hundred miles in a single day at speeds exceeding 60 mph, finding their way home from a place they’ve never been before, and without stopping for food or water.

In the wild, a pigeon lives only about three or four years. But in the relative safety of captivity, a pigeon can live over twenty years.

Their fuel? Richly oxygenated blood, just one ounce of birdseed a day, and a hardwired need to return home.

Columba livia is also an inexplicably obliging bird and incredibly easy to domesticate. If you hold one in your hands, it won’t struggle or bite. And if you let one go, it will always return home. It is these qualities that have led to the rock dove’s unique and unrivaled relationship with humans, making it the world’s first domesticated bird.

Picasso painted them frequently and named his daughter Paloma—Spanish for pigeon.

The rock dove has been our companion for thousands of years. Like most birds, the pigeon is basically a feathered reptilian dinosaur and has roamed the earth in one form or another for over 30 million years. By comparison, we’ve been walking about for a mere 130,000 years.

The pigeon does not migrate but rather adapts to its chosen location year-round.

Mesopotamian cuneiform tablets mention the domestication of pigeons over five thousand years ago, as do Egyptian hieroglyphics.

the pigeon’s most useful skill—its innate ability to “home”—was perhaps first recognized and utilized by ancient Mediterranean seafarers. Although the bird often dwells on coastal cliffs, it has an aversion to large bodies of water and always flies inland in search of food. A bird released from a ship will quickly orient itself to land, and early sailors undoubtedly followed suit.

Genghis Khan and his grandson Kublai Khan created a pigeon post that spanned one sixth of the world. For thousands of years, the fastest way to send a message was by pigeon.

When two pigeons court, they link beaks in a manner that looks a lot like kissing. The birds are actually exchanging food. The female playfully places her beak inside the male’s beak to signal that she expects the male to care for her and, soon, their children. By accepting the female’s beak—and this is where we humans differ—the male is accepting his impending responsibility and not just recreational nookie. When pigeons mate, they mate for life.

One of the earliest known mother-goddesses was the Sumerian, and later Babylonian, goddess Ishtar, “queen of heaven and earth and of the evening star.” She is often depicted either holding a pigeon or as the winged bird herself. The Phoenician goddess of love and fertility, Astarte, was also symbolically represented as a pigeon, as were the Greek goddess Aphrodite and the Roman goddess Venus.

One tradition, hundreds of years old, celebrates the bird in a most unusual manner: intricately carved gourds are attached to specially trained pigeons. The gourds act as whistles of varying octaves and notes, playing music as the birds circle above.

For his courageous persistence, Cher Ami was awarded the French Croix de Guerre. General Pershing shipped the bird back to the United States (in an officer’s berth), where he received a hero’s welcome. The bird died from his multiple war wounds less than a year later. His stuffed but tattered body—carefully balanced on the one remaining leg—can still be seen on display at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.

But in the day, you bred pigeons in your backyard, and they were your life … People just don’t join clubs anymore. Hobbyists are a dying breed. Nowadays all kids want to do is hang out at the mall, watch movies, watch television, and play Nintendo. And yet they’re still bored. Imagine that.”

“Breeding gives me pleasure. It’s a diversion from what I’d ordinarily be doing. It’s satisfying to start with a pair of birds, mate them, and then see how the babies turn out. It’s a lot of work, but it’s also relaxing.”

Believing that it is always best to study some special group, I have joined two of the London Pigeon Clubs. The diversity of the breeds is something astonishing … Such are the variations that an ornithologist would certainly rank them as well-defined species. Yet I am fully convinced that the common opinion of naturalists is correct, namely, that all have descended from the wild rock-pigeon (Columba livia). —Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species

THE GALÁPAGOS ISLANDS ARE A SMALL VOLCANIC ARCHI-pelago about six hundred miles west of Ecuador. The oldest islands are several million years old, and the youngest are still being formed by lava flows.

The first recorded sighting of the islands was by the bishop of Panama, whose boat was blown off course in 1535.

Born into a well-to-do British family in 1809, Darwin rarely excelled at his studies and was an academic disappointment to his father. He was first sent to the University of Edinburgh to study medicine. When that didn’t pan out, Darwin transferred to Cambridge University with the intention of becoming a clergyman.

As Darwin sailed around the archipelago, he identified thirteen different species of finches alone. The greatest physical variation was in the bird’s beak. Some finches had developed long, slender bills to extract pulp from a prickly pear cactus. Some had large beaks for cracking hard seeds. Others had small, thin beaks for extracting grubs.

Darwin did not invent the theory of evolution. Fossil evidence had already cast doubt on the creation myth of Genesis. Darwin’s great contributions would be the how and why of evolution. And it wasn’t the Galápagos and its finches that led him to his theory of natural selection. In fact, he rarely addressed either of them again. Instead, it was his work with pigeons that focused his thinking and sharpened his arguments.

The theory of natural selection maintains that animals will adapt over time to survive better in their environment. Those who are better adapted will thrive and pass on their traits to successive generations. The healthy will leave more descendants than the unhealthy.

large fanned tails, and others strangely feathered feet, they all shared a common ancestor, Columba livia—the humble rock dove.

Darwin speculated (correctly) that if the different fancy breeds were allowed to mate freely in the wild, the offspring would eventually lose their distinctive traits and resemble the rock dove. Darwin termed this phenomenon “reversion.”

Reversion was a revolutionary idea, one that many breeders still marvel at today. Could all their unusual and weird-looking birds really be descendants of one bird—the rock dove?

As Darwin noted, pigeons have been bred for fanciful characteristics since the beginning of recorded history: “It is in human nature to value any novelty, however slight, in one’s own possession.”

modern racing homer, a cross of eight different breeds, all of which contribute to its uncanny athletic and homing ability.

Living organisms, therefore, are not static but malleable. Species are not created out of whole cloth, as the Bible would have us believe, but rather they evolved over time through selective breeding.

The mechanism in charge of driving this evolution is natural selection. While man uses unnatural selection to breed pigeons for whimsy—pigeons that would not survive in the wild—nature uses natural selection to ensure that the fittest survive. Variation in the wild is a…

the first printing of Origin sold out the day of its release. Humanity’s view of its place in the…

Darwin, who belonged to two London pigeon breeding clubs, continued to pursue his beloved hobby. In 1868 he published his treatise The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, which included an exhaustive survey of pigeons. In it, Darwin laid out his theory of inheritance, the…

his early forays into what would become genetics were greatly flawed. He suggested that traits were inherited through a process he named “pangenesis.” Each cell in the body released tiny particles, he argued, that combined in the sexual organs to make eggs and sperm. During conception, these traits…

As Darwin was publishing his Origin of Species, a mild-mannered monk in a secluded monastery a thousand miles away was also addressing the mysteries of heredity. It was his research that would untangle Darwin’s dilemma and restore…

(Gregor) Johann Mendel was born in 1822 to peasant farmers in what was then a rural region of Austria. A sickly child with no obvious aptitude for agriculture, Mendel excelled at his school studies. His family scraped together what little they had—including his sister’s future dowry—to send Mendel to preparatory school. He thrived there and was…

Left with few options to pursue his education, Mendel joined an Augustinian monastery that encouraged higher learning and scientific experimentation. Mendel was given the monastic name Gregor and remained…

Although he continued to teach part-time, Mendel refocused his energies on the mystery of heredity, taking a particular interest in pea plants. Over a period of seven years, he planted nearly thirty thousand of them. Like pigeons, pea plants are relatively straightforward to work with. Mendel selected twenty-two varieties of peas and interbred them, keeping track of seven…

noticed that if he created hybrids of the new tall plants, the result was a mix of tall and short plants. Even more intriguing, the ratio of small to large plants was mathematically predictable—a three-to-one ratio.…

Darwin may have been correct in his assumption that some kind of code was passed from one generation to the next, but as…

The codes—what we now call genes—remained intact. Some of these codes may absent themselves in one generation only to reappear in another: The genetic material was merely in recessive hiding. By negating the premise of blending, the Catholic monk also breathed new life into Darwin’s…

After eight years of meticulous and painstaking work, Mendel presented his theory to the local society of natural scientists. It was received with polite silence. Nobody in the room understood the importance of Mendel’s groundbreaking discovery. A year later, Mendel’s research…

An early-twentieth-century English geneticist named Reginald Punnett would later develop a graphical way to calculate the mathematical probability of inheriting a specific trait. The Punnett square looks like a tic-tac-toe board. Maybe you experimented with it in high school biology class while pondering who would make use of such a thing.

Pigeons come in three basic colors: blue, ash red, and brown. Blue bar and blue checkered are dominant, which explains why wild pigeons—the ones you see in the park—generally have that coloring; it’s the original color of the rock dove.