If there’s one thing Londoners can unite over, it’s revulsion for pigeons. No one likes their gammy feet or their predilection for spattering on cars, buildings and monuments. They are the bane of an office lunch on a park bench, especially when a flock of them flaps into the air around you for no apparent reason. People think they are vermin, “rats with wings”, and they deserve all the bad PR they get.
But something is shifting. And are Londoners late to the party? Pigeons have landed a PR coup with younger generations, who are learning to love them. On TikTok (where else?), the hashtag #pigeontok has more than 150 million views, and there are pigeons with cult followings.
One of the most famous pigeons on the app (in what is a surprisingly competitive field) is a New York rescue called Pidge.
@abby_nyc_ she’s not a dirty bird #pigeonpropaganda #petpigeon #pigeon #pigeontok #rescuepigeon #nyc #birdsarentreal
♬ West Wind - The Ironsides
A video of Pidge being bathed in the shower, wrapped in a towel and stroked by her owner, Abby Jardine, has more than one million likes. Jardine, 27, discovered the pigeon last June nosing around a dumpster next to her apartment in Brooklyn.
“She was probably three or four weeks old, and should have still been in her nest at the time,” Jardine says. When it was still there after several days and looking increasingly scraggly, Jardine scooped it up and took it back to her home. She had planned on taking it to a wildlife rescue centre, but feelings got in the way. “Within five minutes, she was cuddly, and like, sitting on my shoulder,” Jardine says. “I kind of just fell in love with her.”
Pidge is “objectively a better pet” than a rabbit or a guinea pig, with the personality of a low maintenance dog. “She is really snuggly and likes to be petted, but I don’t have to take her outside to go pee in the middle of the winter.” She has free run of the apartment, as well as a makeshift aviary which connects to a sealed-off balcony. There is a box which serves as her toilet, or she will use one of the plant pots around the apartment. The life expectancy of an urban pigeon is two or three years, while a pet pigeon can expect to live up to 20 years.
A distinguished history
In London, things aren’t so cute and cuddly. Nobody quite knows how many pigeons there are, but it’s thought to be about three million, or one for every three humans. Those birds are often dirty and maimed (again, why so many of them are amputees is unclear — studies have found that it could be down to the birds having to stand in their own faeces, or even that their toes get wrapped in human hair and cheese-wired off). It’s a world away from Pidge’s life in the Big Apple. Jardine has taken to carrying her around in her handbag as if she were a chihuahua.
Pidge has ridden the subway, been to restaurants and appeared on a chat show, nestled in Jardine’s purse. She’s even trained to use public bathrooms. In typical New York style, no one bats an eyelid.
So who’s got the wrong end of the stick? The pigeon fanciers or the pigeon haters? Jardine thinks pigeons are unfairly maligned and uses her TikTok to tell people about their history. “We’ve had pigeons as a domesticated animal for like, 5,000 years or something. So this little 100-year stretch of us hating them is really the exception,” she tells me.
Pigeons were an essential form of communication from the Bronze Age onwards and were used to carry messages right up until the Second World War. They made for great posties, thanks to their homing ability, or what BBC Security Correspondent and pigeon fan Gordon Corera describes as their “superpower”.
Pigeon PR wars
In Corera’s book Operation Columba, he tells the story of the pigeons who were dropped as avian spies all over enemy-occupied France. Some of the intel they brought back made it all the way up to Churchill.
If pigeons have anyone to blame for their shoddy reputation, it’s Woody Allen. He referred to them as “rats with wings” in his 1980 film Stardust Memories, and the nickname stuck.
There are campaigners fighting to change the PR image sullied by Allen. “They aren’t wild animals, they are feral,” explains Hannah Hall, who runs a charity, Penny’s Pigeon Aid, in the East Midlands. There’s a key difference — feral animals were once domesticated. “It would be just the same if we suddenly cast aside all of our dogs and cats. They would just bumble around in the street, because where else would they go?”
Hall’s charity is already busting common myths about the birds, like the fact that they are dirty — pigeons actually take pride in bathing as often as possible. She says that the best way to control pigeon populations in urban areas is to keep the streets cleaner and make sure there is less litter lying around. Pigeons would also be less likely to defecate on things like landmarks and people’s heads if local governments created alternative nesting sites, like coops in parks.
Both Jardine and Hall attest to the fact that pigeons are loving, intelligent pets. But Corera points out that they could also prove useful in the future — in an outlandish-sounding scenario. Since we are now so heavily reliant on technology, pigeons would be a lifeline if our communication networks ever collapse. Some countries seem to be more aware of this than others — Corera found reports a few years ago that the Chinese military was training pigeons to use as communication aids. He believes we would be much better off if we lived in harmony with the birds rather than treating them like vermin.
London has little respect for the pigeon. But as the rest of the world learns to love our feathered nemesis, we might find ourselves behind the times. So get ready to change your tune, or face the disdain of the early adopters. As one viral tweet puts it: “Hating pigeons is so incredibly low vibrational.”
Claudia Cockerell is editor of Londoner’s Diary and a culture writer
