Pigeons: Pest? Abandoned Technology
High above an ancient battlefield, a small shadow streaks across the sky. If you could follow its flight, you would see a pigeon, fierce and determined, a tiny cylinder strapped to its leg. Inside that cylinder, a message: perhaps a general’s desperate plea for reinforcements or a lover’s words from a besieged city. For thousands of years, long before the telegraph or telephone, before radio or the internet, humans relied on humble pigeons to carry our words across vast distances. These birds, often dismissed today as “rats with wings” pecking at crumbs in city squares, once bore the hopes of emperors and the fate of armies on their feathered backs.
The partnership between people and pigeons is so old that it slips into legend. The Bible tells of Noah releasing a dove (a close cousin of the pigeon) to find land, and the dove returning with an olive branch, arguably making it the first recorded messenger bird. By around 3000 BCE, in the time of the earliest Egyptian pharaohs and the cities of Mesopotamia, humans had already begun domesticating pigeons. What started as a reliable source of meat (pigeon roosts assured a steady supply of food) turned into something more. People discovered an amazing trait in these birds: if you took a pigeon far away from its home, it would, when released, unerringly fly back to the exact spot it was raised. This remarkable homing ability, a result of the bird’s navigation by the sun, the earth’s magnetic field, and keen sight, became the foundation of a global communication network that would endure for millennia.
In the ancient world, pigeons were the fastest way to send a message long-distance. A fleet-footed human messenger could be intercepted or get lost; smoke signals and drumbeats carried limited information only a short range. But a pigeon, once airborne, would fly straight home at speeds of 50 miles an hour or more, crossing mountains and seas if need be. Thus, rulers and merchants began to use them. On the sun-baked roads of Egypt, when a new pharaoh took the throne, pigeons were released to announce the news to distant cities: each bird essentially a flying herald proclaiming the rise of a new king. In ancient Greece, pigeons delivered the results of the Olympic Games to towns across the land, so that even those far away could celebrate the victors in almost real time by ancient standards. It must have seemed magical: one day the race is run in Olympia, and soon after, a pigeon flutters down in Athens with a scrap of papyrus declaring a champion.
The armies of history, too, found pigeons indispensable. There are accounts that Julius Caesar, during his campaigns in Gaul over 2,000 years ago, used pigeons to send reports back to Rome. It gave him a strategic edge; he could communicate faster than the galloping horses of his enemies. Across the Mediterranean, the cities of the Middle East cultivated pigeon messenger systems. Ancient Persians were said to have one of the first organized pigeon-post services, and by the medieval era, the practice was widespread from Baghdad to Beijing. Genghis Khan, the great conqueror of the 13th century, set up a network of pigeon relay posts across his vast Mongol Empire to carry messages farther and faster than any rider could. One can imagine a Mongol scout, hundreds of miles from the capital, launching a pigeon with news of a distant frontier: a living telegram beating its wings through winds and rain to deliver critical intelligence.
For centuries, these birds were not seen as pests at all, but as critical assets – a kind of biological communication technology. In the castles of Europe, nobles kept dovecotes (pigeon houses) not just for dining, but also as a communications hub. If a castle was under siege and cut off, pigeons could slip through the enemy lines overhead, carrying cries for help. During the brutal Siege of Paris in 1870, when the city was surrounded by Prussian forces, Parisians sent messages out by hot air balloon and brought carrier pigeons back into the city. Those pigeons, released weeks later, flew back to their home lofts in Paris carrying microfilm messages, a 19th-century high-tech mashup of photography and pigeon post that astonished the world. Even as telegraph wires spread in the 1800s, pigeons filled the gaps. One famous entrepreneur, Paul Julius Reuter, who would later found the Reuters news agency, started his business in 1850 by using pigeons to fly stock prices between Belgium and Germany, bridging a missing section of telegraph line. His flock of trained pigeons could beat the fastest train of the day, delivering news and financial data with unprecedented speed. It’s no exaggeration to say that fortunes were won and lost on the backs of pigeons speeding above the European countryside.
Homing pigeons reached their heroic peak during the world wars of the 20th century. In World War I, telegraph lines were often cut and radio was still in its infancy, so armies on the Western Front turned again to these winged messengers. Pigeons routinely carried messages from the trenches back to headquarters. In the chaos of gunfire and artillery, with soldiers huddled in muddy trenches, a slim chance at communication might involve scribbling a note, tucking it into a tiny canister, and fastening it to a pigeon’s leg. Then with a gentle toss upward, the pigeon would take flight, heading for home miles away, carrying the plea for support or the coordinates of enemy positions. These flights were harrowing. Many birds were shot down by enemy soldiers who knew to watch for messenger pigeons. Others faced natural predators and exhaustion. But some made it through and became legends. One such pigeon, named Cher Ami, saved an entire battalion of American soldiers in 1918. Under heavy fire and isolated, the battalion’s last hope was Cher Ami. The little bird flew through a storm of bullets and though gravely wounded (blinded in one eye and with a leg hanging by a thread), it reached headquarters. The message it bore gave the coordinates of the trapped men, who were then rescued. Cher Ami survived long enough to be hailed as a hero, a recipient of the French Croix de Guerre for valor. In World War II, a pigeon named G.I. Joe famously arrived just in time to stop a planned Allied bombing on a town that had been captured ahead of schedule, thus sparing the lives of the Allied troops on the ground. For their bravery, these pigeons and dozens of others received medals and honors. It might sound absurd to pin a medal on a bird, but those who owed their lives to a pigeon’s flight knew that these creatures deserved every ounce of gratitude.
However, as the mid-20th century arrived, technology finally raced ahead of the pigeons. Radio, then satellites, and now the internet, rendered the old pigeon post obsolete. No longer did financiers need flocks of birds to get the edge on the market; no general would think to pack a loft of pigeons when they could use encrypted digital communications. The great pigeon lofts of military fortresses were emptied. The carefully bred racing pigeons, which had been a hobby and a strategic reserve of messenger birds, were less in demand. Yet, the pigeons themselves remained. Many that had been bred for carrying messages or for racing ended up being released or escaped. In cities, pigeon keeping as a pastime gradually declined from the mid-20th century onward (though it still exists in some communities). Without a loft to call home, many domesticated pigeons did what came naturally: they found new “homes” on the ledges and rooftops of our buildings, the cliffs and caves of the urban canyonlands we had created. And they kept breeding, generation after generation, in the heart of our cities.
This is how the revered messenger became the reviled pest. The very qualities that made pigeons ideal for ancient communication networks (their hardiness, their homing instinct, their prolific breeding) made them perfectly suited to urban life without human caretakers. A pigeon will eat just about anything edible, from grain to breadcrumbs to french fries. A city provides plenty of spillage and trash to feast on. A pigeon also needs only a small perch to nest, and our architecture provides endless nooks and crannies: under bridges, on window sills, atop statues. In the wild, the rock dove (the wild ancestor of domestic pigeons) nested on cliffs; to a pigeon, a skyscraper or a dilapidated apartment block is just a fancy cliff, and a balcony is a great ledge to raise a family. And raise families they do. A mating pair of pigeons can produce numerous offspring year-round, far more than would be possible in a natural seasonal cycle. Soon, instead of a handful of prized homing pigeons tended by a dedicated handler, cities were host to thousands of free-flying pigeons living off the human ecosystem in a feral state.
With their numbers and omnipresence, public sentiment toward pigeons soured. By the late 20th century, urbanites had largely forgotten the noble history of these birds. Instead, people saw only the droppings staining the sides of buildings, the flocks underfoot in the plaza, the occasional diseased or injured bird hobbling about. Pigeons became known as "rats with wings," a phrase that captures the disdain many feel for them, as if they were vermin rather than one of humankind’s oldest animal partners. City authorities implemented various (often futile) measures to control pigeon populations: spiking ledges to prevent roosting, hiring hawks or falcons to scare them off, and even contraceptive bird feed to slow their breeding. To the average city dweller, the pigeon seems at best a nuisance and at worst a health hazard. Few pause to consider how intertwined this bird’s story is with our own.
But the pigeons we see today in city squares are not truly wild animals; they are the descendants of domestics, the great-great-grandchildren of the messengers, soldiers, and navigators that served us so faithfully. In a sense, they are urbanized or feral, but they have been shaped by humans for so long (over 5,000 years of domestication) that their natural habitat is effectively alongside us. They are as much a part of human civilization as dogs or cats, even if we grant them far less affection. While we provide dogs and cats with cozy homes and food, pigeons now must fend for themselves – yet it was we who brought them into existence as a species adapted to human-made conditions. The common city pigeon would not exist if our ancestors hadn’t bred the wild rock doves for homing and loyalty. Thus, every pigeon pecking at popcorn on a subway platform is living evidence of our shared history.
In recent years, there has been a small movement of pigeon appreciation, urging cities and residents to see these birds not as pests but as an integral part of the urban ecosystem and our history. Pigeons are actually remarkably intelligent. Studies have shown they can recognize human faces (so the pigeon you shoo away today may remember you tomorrow). They can be trained to distinguish letters of the alphabet or to spot cancer cells in medical images (believe it or not, pigeons have been successfully taught to assist in research by identifying patterns). Their navigation skills still baffle scientists; we understand the basics (sun compass, magnetic fields, smell maps) but the precision of a pigeon finding its way home from hundreds of miles away is a marvel not fully replicated by any technology without GPS. And speaking of GPS, a fun fact: in the modern era, some creative souls have used pigeons to highlight the deficiencies of our own communications infrastructure. In 2009, an IT company famously pitted a homing pigeon carrying a flash drive against the transfer of data over the internet in South Africa; the pigeon delivered the data faster than the broadband upload could. It was a publicity stunt, but it underscored a truth – pigeons remain a viable backup plan when our high-tech systems fail. Indeed, even the U.S. military quietly kept pigeon units up until the 1950s, just in case.
Beyond their utility, pigeons also contribute to city life in subtle ways. They are food for urban raptors like peregrine falcons, which have made comebacks in some cities, and those falcons help control other pests, creating a chain of ecological interactions. Pigeons also consume vast quantities of food waste that might otherwise attract rodents or go rot. None of this is to say cities should encourage large pigeon populations, but it is to point out that they are not useless creatures. They are part of the urban food web, slotting into the niche we unknowingly created for them.
Perhaps more importantly, pigeons deserve a bit of our respect due to our shared heritage. They were once our allies, every bit as much as horses or oxen, doing work for us that we could not easily do ourselves. Imagine ancient mariners trusting a pigeon to guide them to land, or a medieval merchant anxiously awaiting the return of a pigeon bearing news of market prices in a distant port. Imagine the soldiers in the trenches who, hearing the flutter of a returning pigeon overhead, felt a surge of hope because that sound meant their message got through. The pigeons of today’s cities are the descendants of those very birds who carried our messages of joy, sorrow, and survival.
Re-evaluating the pigeon means seeing urban nature with fresh eyes. It means realizing that not every animal that thrives alongside us without invitation is an enemy. Some, like the pigeon, are here precisely because of us, reflecting back at us the consequences of our own actions. We bred a bird to be tame, loyal, and to thrive in human settlements – should we be outraged when it does exactly that without our express permission? Perhaps, instead of unending hostility, we might show a touch of grace. Some cities have started to do so by creating dovecotes where pigeon eggs can be collected (to control the population humanely) and the birds given some health care, rather than simply poisoning or shooting them. A few people take up pigeon keeping again, rediscovering the joys of training these birds and keeping the ancient traditions alive. And many people, whether they love them or hate them, can’t deny that cities would feel eerily empty without the flutter of pigeon wings around old cathedral spires or the cooing sound that softens the harsh concrete soundscape.
In the grand sweep of history, pigeons teach us an ironic lesson: technology may evolve, but our dependence on nature’s gifts remains. We replaced pigeons with wires and wireless signals, yet in doing so we turned a benefactor into a beggar at our feet. Still, the pigeon carries a message for those willing to receive it: a message about resilience, adaptation, and the deep, ancient connections between humans and the animals we domesticate. We may not need pigeons to deliver secret messages anymore, but perhaps the pigeons themselves are the message now, reminding us that our domination over nature has consequences and responsibilities.
So next time you see a plump blue-grey pigeon strutting on the sidewalk, imagine for a moment that it carries invisible saddlebags of history. Within that bird is the echo of Egyptian couriers, Greek heralds, and wartime heroes. Instead of kicking at it or merely wrinkling your nose, consider offering a small salute to this feathered veteran of human progress. The pigeon, our once-esteemed communication partner, has fallen on hard times in the public eye, but it remains what it always was: a symbol of how closely intertwined human civilization is with the creatures we take into our lives. Allies can be unassuming; heroes can have wings and a humble coo. In the pigeon’s coos, if you listen closely, you just might hear the whispers of our own civilization calling back from the skies of history.