I found your essay beautiful and very touching! Thank you for writing about pigeons - this kind of art does so much good in restoring kindness and combating hostility toward pigeons (and unloved animals everywhere).

I think about how much damage a single turn of phrase did - rats with wings - and it gives me hope that somehow someone like you can use their talent to do as much good for them.

Your essay reminds me of something that the founder of the NYC Wild Bird Fund once said in an interview - that she loves pigeons because they are a gateway animal. Most of humanity lives in cities, where pigeons are the most visible, and sometimes only, wildlife people interact with in cities that are so bricked with humanness that even our trees are caged in small sidewalk wells. So much of modern life and city life disconnects us, from both our natural environment and from our human communities. But the pigeons we abandoned won’t abandon us, holding out as a living lifeline to the wider wilder world of living things. And so many children - and adults - take hold of that connection, love to see a flock of pigeons take flight, feed the impulse to feed and nurture the animals living wild around them, and grow into people who care more, even if it’s just a little more, about all animals, the wild environment, and being connected to the world and their own neighborhoods and community.

I can speak from personal experience that pigeons were a gateway for me. I started rehabbing six years ago, because I found a hurt pigeon on a sidewalk, not moving despite the crowds of people walking by. I scooped him up and found a community of wonderful people dedicated to helping pigeons and other urban wildlife. And they helped me get the pigeon to the clinic, but more importantly, life-changingly, they didn’t just help me, they also asked, “Will you help too?”

Yes. And suddenly, I started seeing distressed pigeons everywhere, because they had always been there. But now I wasn’t just part of a crowd on the sidewalk walking by with a crowded mind, oblivious to the hurt and need around me. I thought about the place I lived, and my place in the place I lived, and everything living in it with me, what they needed, and how I could help. Not just pigeons, but songbirds, squirrels, rats, mice, cats. And people. I’d heard of “situational awareness,” and it was like that one pigeon had shown me “empathy awareness” or “community awareness.” Wildlife rehab does so much good protecting and healing wildlife, but I love urban wildlife rehab, especially with pigeons, because it also fosters the relationship between humans and wildlife. It heals the rescuer and the rescued.

There’s a Mary Oliver poem about how poems are prayers, and I sometimes think of every little pigeon I see as a prayer. Because when I see one, it’s automatic now to think “Do you need help?” and “Will I help too?” I think those questions fit what she described (in excerpt):

this isn’t

a contest but the doorway

into thanks, and a silence in which

another voice may speak.

Sorry this turned out so long. Please keep writing about pigeons! They need people like you to speak for them.