I hate how pigeons get stuff stuck on their feet. I see this problem in New York all the time, and it exists in cities around the world. It does not obsess me—I don’t believe that people should become obsessed by things, in general—but, whenever I see it, it pains me. City pigeons have other foot problems, too. They get burns from landing on hot lighted signs, and injuries from close calls with vehicles and predators, and abrasions from jagged concrete, and diseases like bumblefoot, a bacterial infection that can cause their toes to curl up and fall off. Humans wear shoes, dogs sometimes sport booties on salt-covered winter sidewalks, N.Y.P.D. farriers replace the police horses’ shoes every four to six weeks, some pet stores even sell foot coverings for cats (which cats despise), but pigeons deal with the feet-unfriendly city barefoot.
The law intersects with pigeons at the legs. Officially, street pigeons are not vermin, like rats, another species of barefoot city dweller, with which they are often unfairly lumped. You can do anything you want to New York’s rats, but you need a license to trap pigeons. If a pigeon belongs to somebody, the owner puts a band on the pigeon’s tarsus (the lower leg, just above the foot) to claim and identify it. Stricter laws dictate what is lawful and unlawful to do to a banded pigeon; it falls under society’s extra protections, like any banded bird, or like a dog with a collar. But I have never seen a banded pigeon on the street. The pigeons standing in public spaces and flying around in transit terminals and other wide-open structures are like wild creatures living outside the law.
I came by my non-obsession years ago, when I was taking plastic bags out of trees with my friends Bill and Tim McClelland. Tim and I had invented a device we called the bag snagger (U.S. Patent No. 5,566,538), which consists of three short spokelike metal posts on a central axis made of a larger metal piece ending in a sicklelike cutting blade. By inveigling the plastic bag with the spokes in a twisting motion, we could hold it for the curved blade to cut free when pulled downward. The snagger fit into the end of an eight-foot-long fibreglass window-washing pole, which fit into a six-foot pole, which fit into another six-foot pole, and so on, making a wobbly arm that could reach thirty feet or more.
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One afternoon, we were taking bags out of trees in Collect Pond Park, which is on Centre Street, in the downtown complex of court buildings. Collect Pond was where many city residents used to get their water before 1842, when the original Croton Aqueduct started bringing upstate water to the city. The pond’s seepage was a source of cholera outbreaks, and a certain unidentifiable gloom still hangs around the park that is on the site now.
In one of the trees, high up, wings outspread, hung a pigeon. Squinting up at it, we saw that its feet were ensnared in debris, possibly a piece of ribbon from a party balloon. The debris was also entangled with the branch. Evidently, the pigeon had got its feet stuck there and starved to death. The scene looked grisly, and we set about to cut the pigeon down and give it a requiescat in a nearby trash barrel. As soon as the pole and snagger got within ten feet of the corpse, the whole park came alive. Pigeons that had been perched in trees or walking on the pavement suddenly swooped high into the air and wheeled and banked and swerved around their dead companion with the unanimity of synchronized swimmers. They made their understated cries mournfully, insistently. Operating the pole that high up is hard enough without birds flying all around it, so we brought it down. I had never thought that pigeons cared about other pigeons. Male and female pigeons pair up for life, so maybe one of the wheeling birds was the dead one’s mate. Seeing how upset the birds were, I grasped how hard watching their companion’s slow death must have been.
Like us, and like most birds, pigeons have one right foot and one left foot. Each pigeon foot has three toes in front and one behind, in a configuration like that of the straight lines in the peace sign—fittingly, because the pigeon has been used as a symbol of peace. The pigeon’s hind toe, also called the hallux, has two bones, or phalanges. The second toe (the first of the three front toes) has three phalanges; the third, or middle, toe has four phalanges; and the fourth, or outer, toe has five phalanges. Each toe ends in a claw that can bend upward if you gently lift it. All four toes are on the same plane and form a solid base for the leg. Individuals with foot problems often pull the disabled foot up next to their bodies and stand securely on the healthy foot.
Pigeons can fly at speeds of fifty miles an hour or more, as can be observed on city streets when they fly faster than the traffic. When you’re in an elevated subway, you might see them flying next to the windows briefly before they pass the train. In flight, they hold their feet close to the tail or under the belly. Pigeons are also good runners and walkers. Homing pigeons, which are trained to return to their roosts from great distances, sometimes get injured, and, if they can’t fly, have been known to spend days or weeks walking home.
A pigeon is basically the same as a dove. The two types of bird are “too similar in structure and behavior to provide a scientific foundation for their separation,” according to one expert. The pigeons in the park and the white doves released during outdoor ceremonies are two species of the family Columbidae. Street pigeons are a variety of the species Columba livia, the rock pigeon—so called because in the true wild it lives on sea cliffs and canyon walls. As a word, “dove” sounds better than “pigeon.” Doves, pigeons, and other varieties of Columbidae are able to fly straight up from a standing start, and to volplane, or dive straight down. That may be why the dove became a symbol for the Holy Spirit. John the Baptist, describing how he first knew that Jesus was the Messiah, said, “I saw the Spirit descending from Heaven like a dove, and it abode upon him.” That sentence sounds different if you substitute “pigeon” for “dove.”
C. livia’s brisk reproductive cycle is ideal for producing new strains. For hundreds of years, people have been breeding varieties with special qualities or abilities. (A breed called Tumblers do somersaults in flight and sometimes on the ground; Pouters can inflate a pouch on their throat to about twice its original size; Cumulets are high fliers whose flocks resemble cumulus clouds; Nuns are black-and-white; Runts, weirdly, are huge; Fantails display their multi-feathered tails like turkeys or peacocks.) Exotic varieties will die off or will revert to ordinary street pigeons in several generations if humans get bored with them and stop rebreeding them.
Charles Darwin was a pigeon fancier, and his experiences with breeding and raising them helped inspire the theories in “On the Origin of Species.” He paid close attention to their feet. The reptilelike skin on a pigeon’s lower legs and feet is formed into scales, which he called scutellae. These are not like fish scales but resemble medium-sized beads on a string. Darwin examined the feet of different species and breeds, scutella by scutella. (The word derives from scutum, Latin for “shield.”) He found that one breed had only eight scutellae on the hind toe but sixteen on the middle toe, and another had twelve scutellae on the middle toe and five on the hind toe. Certain breeds with feathered feet had slightly webbed toes. Details like these encouraged him in his speculations about evolution within species.
Most varieties of C. livia have feet that are coral-reddish, shading to pink. The color makes the feet look possibly sore even when there’s nothing wrong with them. Scientists do not tell us that after the flood, when the ark had come to rest atop Ararat, Noah sent out a dove, and it returned with red mud on its feet, indicating to Noah that the waters had receded, so Noah asked God to make the feet of these birds red from that day on, and God did. This is a traditional prescientific explanation for the color of pigeon feet.
Pat McCarthy, a rangy, affable young visual artist who lives near the Halsey Avenue stop on the J train, in Bushwick, Brooklyn, keeps about a hundred pigeons on the roof of his building during the winter. (In warmer weather, he moves them to the Catskills, where he has a farm.) One afternoon, he led me up a steel ladder from the building’s fire escape and over a patch of ice to the coop, where the birds were kind of burbling, like gently percolating coffee. He opened the door and took out an adult pigeon and showed it to me. It sat peaceably in his hand as he spread its feet between his fingers. The foot felt soft, like my grandmother’s hands when I was seven. McCarthy and I had been talking about “string-foot”—the common problem of pigeons getting string, threads, human hair, etc., wrapped around their feet and legs. “I think this is the key to it, right here,” McCarthy said, running a fingernail along the thin lines between the scales. “The thread, or whatever, gets itself into these little indentations, and then it catches and winds tight and won’t come out.”
McCarthy’s pigeons don’t get string-foot, because, like other domesticated pigeons, they don’t live on the street and don’t have to build nests. When street pigeons build nests, which the males and females do together, sometimes they use string, hair, wires, and other found items that are then constantly at the feet of the mated pair as they take turns sitting on the eggs. The nests are the source of some cases of string-foot. People who keep pigeons tend to have disdain for street pigeons. McCarthy likes both kinds, though he loves his own birds best. A long pole with a large black trash bag for a flag at one end lies next to the coop. McCarthy uses it to signal his birds when he flies them—a thrilling pastime, watching the birds soar high above the rooftops and water tanks of Brooklyn.
A major hazard is peregrine falcons, which sometimes appear out of nowhere and rocket into the flocks from below, killing birds and making off with them. The largest urban concentration of peregrine falcons in North America lives in New York City. The falcons nest on ledges and in the superstructure of bridges, and they seem to prefer preying on pigeons flown by hobbyists like McCarthy to chasing street pigeons (though falcons, as well as hawks, feed on those, too). Sometimes when McCarthy flies his birds they come close to flocks belonging to other pigeon fliers, and birds peel off and join McCarthy’s pigeons and come home with them. He checks out the bands on the birds’ legs, but, like most pigeoneers who capture birds, he keeps them. This happens wherever people fly pigeons. A pigeon flier in Cairo used to kill the captured birds and hang up their feet as trophies.
Just off the entry hall of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in the displays of ancient Greek sculpture, is a marble memorial marker, or stela, about three feet high. According to the label, it shows a girl saying farewell to her pet doves. The bird in her right hand is raising its bill to her lips; she holds the other bird in her left. The stela was carved between 450 and 440 B.C. and comes from the marble-rich Cycladic Islands. Its sculptor could have been among those who decorated the Parthenon later in that century, the label says. The doves in the poignant, almost twenty-five-hundred-year-old sculpture look very much like the pigeons walking and flapping around the museum’s plaza along Fifth Avenue, out front.
When I’m in the neighborhood, I stop to talk to a woman who feeds the pigeons by the East Seventy-ninth Street end of the plaza. She is there at all hours. A maintenance guy in an electric John Deere mini-pickup told me that he has seen her feeding them at 5 a.m. in the summer. She has a folding table; an ironing board; a cart with handles at both ends that contains a dozen or more orange-and-green Fresh Direct shopping bags; a broom; some pet-size water bowls; a pair of hockey sticks; and various bread knives. She has told me that she comes from Poland and now lives in her car, which is parked nearby. Her conversation can devolve into a kind of radio-static recitation of terrible things that happened in Poland in the previous century. On the ironing board, which is set at a convenient height, she cuts up old loaves that she gets for free from a nearby bakery, and then she tosses the bread cubes onto the granite paving blocks of the plaza. Pigeons appear almost instantly, pecking so avidly that dozens of individual bread cubes go flying into the air above the mass of birds like popping popcorn. Sometimes she looks over her shoulder for hawks and falcons. Once, when the pigeons all left simultaneously before the food was consumed, she said a hawk had come. I looked up in the trees but couldn’t see it. On occasion, she points out a limping bird, whose leg she says was broken by a hawk.
Helen Lukievics, a retired litigator who lives in Brooklyn Heights, has taken string and other entanglements off the feet of pigeons in New York, Amsterdam, Paris, Takamatsu (on Shikoku Island, in Japan), and Chiang Mai, Thailand. In her youth, she went alone to far-flung destinations for the sake of adventure, but now she travels less riskily with her husband and keeps a lookout for string-foot pigeons. First, she has to catch them, which she learned was possible by watching an Egyptian vender at a coffee wagon near her law office, on Wall Street. She finds a place to sit where she can reach the ground with her right hand, takes care that the sun is not behind her (moving shadows spook pigeons), wears pants tight enough that wind won’t flap them, and does not make eye contact with the string-foot she is trying for. Then she starts sprinkling birdseed to lure all the pigeons closer. When the targeted one is under her hand, she presses it to the ground, brings it up to her chest with her other hand, and wraps it in a cut-up T-shirt and takes it to her apartment or hotel room for de-stringing.
Sometimes the police get suspicious, thinking that Lukievics wants to eat the pigeon, and onlookers tell her to leave the birds alone—but everybody understands when she shows the feet. A few months ago, when she was in Chiang Mai, she sent me e-mails about a pigeon she had come across on her visit. It had a weird, complicated foot entanglement that included a circle of bamboo. The bird was very thin and appeared to have been abandoned by its flock. She caught the pigeon and removed the bamboo and other complications from its feet. As she did, the bird rested in the T-shirt fabric, and its bill never let go of the piece of croissant she had used as bait.
The Wild Bird Fund, a wildlife rehab facility in a storefront near the corner of West Eighty-seventh Street and Columbus Avenue, treats more than twelve thousand animals a year, from tiny songbirds to kestrels, seagulls, hawks, vultures, and wild turkeys. Of the total, about half are pigeons, and between five hundred and six hundred of them have foot tangles. At certain times of year, the Wild Bird Fund might see two or three string-foot birds in a day.
One afternoon, Rita McMahon, the W.B.F.’s executive director, gave me a tour. She is a retired market researcher—youthful-looking, with short dark hair, blue eyes, and lavender-tinted glasses. She wore a black pullover and black jeans and carried a light-gray cellphone in her right back pants pocket. Someone had just brought in a seagull that had been hit by a car. Two of the W.B.F. staff were testing it for avian flu, using kits that look almost exactly like Covid test kits. The seagull was kept in a vestibule in case it tested positive. It turned out to be negative, but it would have to be euthanized anyway, because it was so badly injured. The W.B.F. tests vulnerable birds, like waterfowl, at intake to keep track of the disease, and thereby provides the city with an early-alert resource for avian flu. For some reason, pigeons are highly resistant to it. Scientists have injected pigeons with the avian-flu virus, and even then they mostly didn’t come down with it.
On the first floor of the center are a reception area, an exam room the size of a large closet, an incubator for baby birds, a waterfowl room with a little pool, and a high-tech machine that can test blood samples for the presence of lead. Pigeons stick to their neighborhood, and if their blood has a high lead content it’s possible that the children of that neighborhood have lead in their blood, too. During the city’s past, in the decades of leaded gasoline and paint, lead accumulated in the city’s fabric, and became a randomly distributed ingredient of its dust and soil.
In the W.B.F.’s basement, recovering pigeons sat in pet-carrier cages stacked atop one another, or socialized at liberty on high ledges. Convalescence did not stop a few of the males from strutting in courtship behavior. All the birds seemed happy to be with their fellow-birds, and with the gentle, attentive staff. McMahon showed me a pigeon that was being treated for trichomoniasis, a microscopic parasite that can get in the throat and essentially suffocates the bird. Trichomoniasis, or something like it, existed in the time of the dinosaurs, and McMahon said that it had afflicted Sue, the T. Rex in the Field Museum, in Chicago. In fact, it probably hadn’t, as I learned later; but I liked to think of horrid parasites like trichomoniasis going back that far. Today, there are medicines that kill it.
The best catcher of string-foot pigeons in the city (the W.B.F. says) is Lori Lapatin, a seventy-year-old woman who lives near West Fortieth Street and Ninth Avenue. She learned the art a dozen years ago, from watching a woman who was a clerk at Macy’s and caught distressed pigeons in and around Herald Square on her lunch hour. Today, Lapatin frequents the same area. I have spoken to her only on the phone, though I look for her whenever I’m passing through Herald Square, or anywhere on the west side of midtown. She has a kindly voice. The local pigeons know her, she says, and even land on her shopping cart. She thinks some of the pigeons’ suffering is caused by psychopaths who tie their feet together deliberately or net them so they can be used as targets at pigeon shoots in Pennsylvania.
One Saturday morning, Lapatin dropped off at the W.B.F. a string-foot with a severe entanglement. I came by soon after. Looking at the intake form, I admired her distinctive handwriting, a bold upright printing that the W.B.F.’s staff can identify at a glance. She had caught the bird in a busy place—Forty-second Street and Eighth Avenue. Rachel Frank, a W.B.F. clinician, was getting ready to doctor the pigeon in the exam room. Frank is in her early forties, comes from Kentucky, and has curly blonde hair and blue eyes (everyone at the W.B.F. wore a mask). When not working at the W.B.F., she makes sculpture, and she teaches one art class a week at Hunter College.
Frank took the pigeon out of its intake pet carrier. The bird seemed unresistant, but it watched her closely with one eye and then the other, something pigeons do to improve their depth perception. “This one is what we call B.A.R.,” Frank said. “That means it’s bright, alert, and responsive. Impaired birds are Q.A.R.—quiet, alert, and responsive. Except for the feet, it’s in good shape. The ones Lori brings in are usually B.A.R., because they don’t have to be impaired for her to catch them.” After testing the bird’s flapping ability by holding it at its midsection and raising it up (flapping normal), and listening to its heartbeat (also normal) with a stethoscope, she gave it an injection of sterile fluid to keep it hydrated, and then an intramuscular injection of pain medication. She put a clear conical mask over its head and bill and began a flow of oxygen, combined with isoflurane gas to knock it out. Then she carefully laid it on a spread-out towel, with its head on a rolled-up towel for a pillow. The de-stringing was likely to hurt, and she thought the bird would be safer if it was unconscious. In a few seconds, its eyes had glazed over.__
The pigeon lay with its feet spread, like a K.O.’d boxer. Frank started on the left foot, using scissors, tweezers, and other sanitized instruments she took from plastic packages. The work requires a watchmaker’s focus. She cut through brown packing twine and dark pieces of thread and unwound them with the tweezers. The right foot was even worse than the left—a fright-wig mass of string, feathers, human hair, and some pale, waxy, tightly wrapped stuff that turned out to be dental floss. She unpicked the layers carefully, one at a time. When both feet were done, she put an antibiotic cream on the lesions with a Q-tip, and bandaged them with thin pieces of gauze and strips of vet wrap to hold it.
Frank turned off the isoflurane but left the oxygen on, and the pigeon began to regain consciousness. I wondered what consciousness it was regaining. What is the consciousness of a pigeon? I watched it move its bill as it took deeper breaths. Then an eye kind of clicked on. It looked around with it, and then with the other eye. Pigeons’ eyes take up most of their skulls, with just a membrane of bone between them, and pigeons see with more clarity than we do, especially close up. I’ve watched them peck at food invisible to me—maybe tiny seeds, or crumbs of crumbs. What was this pigeon seeing now? Pigeons are clever and can be trained to perform complex tasks. Their memory for places and for their home roost is unshakable, as homing pigeons have demonstrated. If released from here, on the Upper West Side, this bird would no doubt be able to make its way back to Forty-second Street and Eighth Avenue.
It did not seem particularly surprised to find itself on an uptown operating table with bandaged feet. Soon it was its bright, alert, and responsive self again. Frank picked it up, checked it out, listened to its heart again, and put it in a black plastic takeout-food container filled with birdseed which would provide full-length body support while it waited for its feet to heal. Plus, the bird wouldn’t need to stand up or walk anyplace for food. Frank set container and bird in the pet carrier to be moved to a recovery room. W.B.F. staff would monitor the pigeon and change its bandages every few days. None of its toes would have to be amputated, nor would either foot need the pigeon-foot-shaped splint that Frank had designed herself and printed on a 3-D printer.
What do pigeons think? Do they have character, good or bad? One afternoon, I drove down to Fort Monmouth, New Jersey, to see some taxidermied homing pigeons that had lost legs and feet in the First World War. Fort Monmouth, a former military base, used to be a headquarters for training homing pigeons and their handlers. After that war, several notable pigeons lived out their lives at Fort Monmouth—one of them died in 1937, at the advanced (for a pigeon) age of twenty. For various reasons, including the fact that the Army had closed the fort in 2011, I did not find these pigeons. But at a nearby museum, to which I thought they might have been moved, I got some leads; these brought me eventually to Frank Blazich, a curator of modern military history at the Smithsonian Institution, where he specializes in homing pigeons.
“I love my pigeons!” Blazich said, when I reached him on the phone. He listed some of the famous homing pigeons in the Smithsonian’s collection: Kaiser, a captured German pigeon; Global Girl, who carried messages around the Mediterranean Theatre in the Second World War; and Cher Ami, the one I’d most hoped to find at Fort Monmouth, to whom the French had awarded the Croix de Guerre. Blazich said that Cher Ami was supposedly the homing pigeon who saved the encircled unit of more than six hundred men later known as the Lost Battalion, who were part of the 77th Division of the U.S. Army, during the fighting in the Meuse-Argonne.
Immigrants who lived in New York City made up most of the original 77th Division. Today, there are several memorials to this unit in the city, including the U.S. Army 77th Infantry Division Expressway (I-295), which runs south from the Throgs Neck Bridge, in Queens. In October of 1918, men of the 77th fought their way through the Argonne Forest and pushed the German line so far back that it closed in behind some of them. Trapped in a ravine, they were being shelled by Allied artillery. Their commander, Major Charles W. Whittlesey, a thirty-four-year-old Williams College graduate, tried to get a message through to the artillery, but his couriers ran into Germans. The story goes that Major Whittlesey, down to his last pigeon, wrote a message on ultra-light paper and put it in an aluminum tube clipped to Cher Ami’s leg. The major described his location and the bombardment he and his men were under, and ended the message “For heaven’s sake stop it.”
When released, the pigeon flew up into a tree. After a while, with some coaxing, he took off, but a piece of flying metal knocked him from the air and he fell to the ground. In a few minutes, he took off again and continued on to his destination, about thirty kilometres away. He arrived wounded through the breast, and with his right foot nearly severed but the tube still attached. The message was read, the artillery corrected, and the shells stopped hitting the men of the 77th and started hitting the Germans. Allied forces soon moved up on either side of Whittlesey, and together they drove the enemy out of the forest. Reporters praised the courage, tenacity, and endurance of what they called the Lost Battalion. It became the most famous American unit in the war.
Given the confusion of battle, Cher Ami may not have actually saved the Lost Battalion, but the press said he did, and he definitely had been wounded carrying a message for one Allied unit or another. His Croix de Guerre is in the National Museum of the United States Army, in Fort Belvoir, Virginia. The public loved hearing about him. Cher Ami was as well known, in his day, as Sergeant York or any other human war hero. Brought to the U.S. to live out his life in comfort, the pigeon died of his wounds in 1919. He had been hatched in March or April of 1918, and flew his heroic mission when he was less than a year old.
Do pigeons have character? Sometimes when I’m waiting for a train at Penn Station I go out one of the back entrances and cross Eighth Avenue to watch the pigeons that are always on the wide, broad steps of the former General Post Office (now Moynihan Train Hall). They are of various personalities and dispositions. Some still think that I might have bread crumbs for them; some remember that I don’t. There are a few that fight the seagulls when the gulls try to steal a pizza crust that all the pigeons have been worrying, and there are a few that hang back and wait until the gulls are driven off. Some pigeons seem brave, some don’t, and most are in between.
When I said this to Blazich, he said, “I lead school groups on tours sometimes, and at the pigeon display I describe what Cher Ami and other homing pigeons did in the war. I tell the kids that after both the First and Second World Wars the Army sold off thousands of birds, including some who had carried messages on the battlefield. The new owners may have flown their pigeons recreationally, and birds sometimes go astray. We can be sure that some of the homing pigeons would have disappeared, one way or another, and entered the general pigeon population, and some of the strayed birds would have reproduced and passed along their genes. I always tell the kids, ‘So when you see pigeons on the sidewalk, or in a playground, remember that some of these birds have the blood of heroes in their veins.’ ” ♦
