IV. The Global Pigeon

Introduction

City Birds 

The pigeon is a felicitous animal for exploring the social significance of cross-species urban entanglements. These birds are thoroughly entrenched in the cityscape. As ground feeders and the descendents of cliff dwellers, pigeons are right at home pacing the sidewalks to scrounge for food and making nests on window ledges. They stalk among commuters, coax park visitors into feeding them, and scavenge the waste that humans leave behind. Although urbanization endangers many plant and animal species, pigeons are exquisitely adapted to a brave new world where ecosystems are laid over concrete. Despite the fact that people may treat the sidewalk as a “defended territory” in which these unmanageable creatures are unwelcome “invaders,”¹ pigeons have in effect become naturalized urban citizens. Their presence on city streets is utterly pedestrian, in both senses of the word. It was this pedestrian quality of pigeons—mundane, commonplace streetwalkers — that brought them into my sociological field of vision as I observed everyday urban life in Greenwich Village. 

Commonly referred to as “rats with wings,” a label meant to characterize them as filthy vectors of disease, pigeons in New York—and many cities worldwide—are typically considered pernicious “nuisance animals.” New York’s built environment includes myriad (often futile) devices designed to repel pigeons: plastic owls on rooftops; spikes on ledges and over doors; speakers blaring recordings of birds of prey from the cornices of Union Square, Times Square, and the JFK airport; and the ubiquitous green “Do Not Feed the Pigeons” signs that the Parks Department has placed in nearly every square and park. In 2003, Bryant Park even employed a trained hawk to scare away the pigeons, though it was decommissioned after mauling a pedestrian’s Chihuahua. And in 2007, a Brooklyn councilman’s report recommended the appointment of a “pigeon czar” to oversee pigeon control and a $1,000 fine for feeding pigeons. The city also considered feeding its pigeons birth control, a method adopted in Hollywood, and purchasing $4,000 robotic hawks, used in Liverpool. Pigeons—rugged, unafraid, and adaptable—seem to be the quintessential city bird, but one that many urbanites wish would disappear. This incongruity was on display when the New York City Parks Department selected “Parker the Pigeon” as a finalist for the “perfect” New York mascot even though the Parks Department was actively involved in controlling pigeons and regarded them as a nuisance.² 

New York City is hardly unique in its efforts to control pigeons. Across North America and Europe, and in many cities in Asia, Africa, and South America, antipigeon artifacts — such as sticky gel strips on ledges and nets over door entrances—are ensconced features of urban architecture. Cities and towns around the world have also criminalized pigeon feeding to control their numbers and the problems linked to them, from respiratory diseases that are potentially transmissible to humans, such as psittacosis, to the property damage that can result from their acidic feces. Though the threat of disease is one of the most often cited rationales for pigeon control (and pigeon loathing), epidemiologists and biologists consider the public health risk of street pigeons to be “very low, even for humans involved in occupations that bring them into close contact with nesting sites.”³ Their threat to property, however, is more tangible. 

One pigeon can produce up to 25 pounds of droppings per year, and a 2008 study of Venice, Italy, claimed that the city—with a pigeon population estimated to be as high as 130,000—spent an annual average of €16 – 23 per pigeon to remove the guano from its historic monuments and streets. London’s former mayor Ken Livingstone calculated that it cost $235,000 every year to clean up pigeon feces in Trafalgar Square; and one estimate put the annual cost of pigeon-related damage to property in the United States at $1.1 billion. In response, from Pittsburgh to Prague control tactics include shooting, electrocuting, and poisoning pigeons.⁴  

People have not always deemed pigeons “nuisance animals” or sought to reduce their numbers. And it is only in the last century or so that pigeons have come to be considered distinct from doves. “Rock pigeons,” also called “rock doves” (Columba livia), were first domesticated about 5,000 years ago, and for millennia humans selectively bred them to meet a variety of material needs. The legacy of these efforts is omnipresent: the gray pigeons with black-barred wings and iridescent neck feathers that occupy city streets worldwide today are rock pigeons’ feral descendents. Their origin is usually traced to North Africa, parts of Mediterranean Europe, the Indian Subcontinent, and central Asia; but commerce brought them around the world. 

Pigeons partly domesticated themselves. It is thought that the mud and stone walls of ancient human dwellings, so similar to the rock pigeon’s natural habitat of rocky ledges, cliffs, and caves, served as decent nesting sites. Pigeons were also attracted to the grains that emerging agricultural societies produced. Rather than viewing these avian interlopers as pests, humans saw them as a source of food, and they discovered that pigeon guano made excellent fertilizer. Rock pigeons were valued and even revered in premodern times for their “reproductive magic,” breeding more often and for a longer season (year round) than most other animals. Their gregariousness and docility also made them fitting symbols of peace (their predators, hawks, stand for aggression).⁵ Humans took advantage of pigeons’ adaptability and submissiveness, building houses called dovecotes that lured the birds into semidomesticity and allowed for the easy harvesting of their flesh, eggs, and feces. In feudal times, pigeon meat and guano were deemed so valuable that the right to own a dovecote was restricted to nobility—no wonder, then, that so many of these ornate structures were toppled in the wake of the French Revolution.⁶  

Rock pigeons are extraordinarily malleable. Over time, humans bred larger and fatter varieties for food, and stronger and leaner varieties with enhanced “homing” instincts (called homers) that could carry messages over hundreds of miles. But many pigeon breeds were created for noninstrumental ends; they instead reflected the aesthetic and leisurely preferences of fanciers (breeders), who by the 19th century had organized clubs and competitions based on the appearance or performance of particular pigeon breeds—akin to the Westminster dog show or greyhound racing. Long-distance pigeon races became particularly popular in Belgium and other parts of western Europe. By the early 20th century, the sport had been imported to the United States. New York alone boasted dozens of homing pigeon racing clubs; and rooftop and backyard coops became common features of industrial cityscapes, from Chicago to Germany’s Ruhr district. 

The historian James Secord attributes the popularity of pigeon fancying in Western cities to the fact that it “provided the harried urban dweller with a link, however tenuous, to a rural and Arcadian past” and served as a pretext for “social gatherings and congenial conversation.” Pigeons were cheap, easy to breed, and needed little space or attention. Further, Secord speculates that fancying “fascinated the Victorians by keeping nature close at hand yet under control.”⁷ Pigeon fancying was so popular, and the variation in shapes, sizes, and colors that fanciers had produced through centuries of selective breeding was so extraordinary, that Charles Darwin opened On the Origin of Species with an exhaustive genealogy of so-called “toy” pigeon breeds. The “selecting hand” of nature “was manifested . . . in man’s actions as a breeder.” Skeptical of his scientific theory, Darwin’s colleagues had urged him to scrap Origin in favor of a book solely about pigeon breeds. His editor remarked, “Everybody is interested in pigeons.”⁸ 

The pigeons that occupy our sidewalks never existed in the wild. They are descendants of escaped domesticated pigeons that were imported to the United States, Europe, and elsewhere centuries ago. In fact, it was French settlers who introduced the rock dove to North America in the early 1600s, primarily for consumption. With humans’ help, pigeons have proved to be uniquely adept at living in urban settings, replacing cliffs with cornices. But pigeons are no longer useful to most societies as messengers or as sources of food and fertilizer, having been replaced by cheaper and more efficient alternatives. And pigeon fancying is far less popular than in the Victorian era, so much so that the intimate associations that fanciers have with their birds strike some observers as anachronistic. Finally, though in decades past it was so popular to feed street pigeons that urban parks commonly had dedicated feeding areas and even vendors or machines selling seed for the birds, these days pigeons—and the people who feed them—are often unwelcome in public spaces. The pigeon’s fecundity, nitrogen-rich feces, proclivity to return home, and easy adaptability to human environments — traits that people once valued and intentionally enhanced—are exactly the traits that bother so many contemporary urban dwellers. 

Society, then, has abetted an animal whose niche is one designed to be the exclusive habitat of humans: the sidewalk. Having forsaken pastoral life, pigeons humble our efforts to place a firewall between “urban” and “natural.” These nonnative, feral birds—neither purely wild nor domestic—now confront humans as our own historical detritus and are regularly met with public antipathy. But because pigeons breed up to the available food supply, efforts to control them are doomed to fail as long as there is available food, which cities provide in abundance thanks to their prolific amounts of discarded organic garbage and to the many people who intentionally feed them. The result is that pigeons seem to be inextricably enmeshed in a symbiotic—some say parasitic—relationship with society. They are what biologists call synanthropes (literally, “together with man”), preferring to live among people in the built environment.⁹ In true Darwinian fashion, pigeons have adapted their habits to our own. Synanthropes like pigeons challenge the conventional notion that urbanization has insulated people from contact with animals and nature. 

Nature Lost? 

While the decline of urban pigeon fancying is a story about neighborhood change, it is also—as Alderman Allen indicated—a story about our changing relationships with animals and nature in the city. Today, only vestiges remain of the human-animal relations that once typified working-class urban communities in the United States and Europe, whose yards—to quote from an ethnography of East London in the 1950s— commonly included “hutches for guinea-pigs, lofts for pigeons, and pens for fowls.”¹⁰ Over the course of the 20th century, traces of pastoralism were systematically expunged from city streets in accordance with the consolidation of a bourgeois “imaginative geography” that drew a clear- cut distinction between town and country. As Chris Philo demonstrates, the near-obliteration of urban animal husbandry—largely through zoning restrictions — cannot be fully explained by instrumental concerns like public health. Urban elites felt that the presence of livestock animals and their “beastly” habits (e.g., fornication) threatened a sense of order, civility, and decency in public space. And outlawing urban animal husbandry was thought to be a particularly effective means of civilizing the lower classes, whose alleged immorality and indolence were partly attributed to their habit of sharing spaces with animals.¹¹

Although the contrast between town and country is an ideal that seldom neatly maps onto reality, environmental scholars argue that this compartmental imaginary has become embedded in the collective conscience of Western societies as an interpretive frame, organizing people’s experience of the environment. Through this lens, the city is idealized as an orderly grid where nonhumans are kept under control and boxed into manicured settings such as parks and gardens. Thus, it is not only livestock that are interpreted as taboo in the modern city. What people classify as “pests” or “nuisance animals” are in fact those species of “wildlife” that trespass on sidewalks and colonize human dwellings in spite of efforts to designate these spaces as human-only places. Their unwitting “transgression” of our “spatial expectations” can be existentially unsettling because it is read as “matter out of place.”¹² 

[...] It is through this spatial logic that pigeons have emerged over the last half century as a significant urban problem. Given their origins as cliff dwellers and their history of domestication in cities, compared to many other urban critters, pigeons stand out as possessing a peculiar partiality for stone and concrete. They mate, defecate, live, and die on our sidewalks and ledges rather than in trees or other “green” spaces, making their pollution of the urban spatial order particularly flagrant and offensive. Though it was once so popular to feed street pigeons that urban parks routinely marked off designated feeding areas or even hosted vendors so that pedestrians could buy feed for the birds, a growing intolerance for chaotic, untamed, and dirty nature in the midst of the city has rendered this animal a “homeless” species. As scavengers of humans’ refuse, pigeons’ figurative pollution of sidewalks is solidified through their association with literal pollution—a linkage captured by the moniker “rat with wings.” 

Concerns over public health and property damage do play an important role in pigeons’ designation as a nuisance. However, I have argued that the collective desire to remove them from our streets supersedes instrumental interests—it is also a moral matter. As mentioned, the label “rat with wings” was born out of a Parks Department commissioner’s efforts to associate pigeons with other symbols of disorder and deviance in New York in the 1960s (e.g., litterers, homosexuals, and “winos”). My interest in studying pigeons grew from the conflation of the “pigeon problem” with the “homeless problem” in Father Demo Square, and the mayors of London and Venice both hitched pigeons to a larger “quality of life” narrative in which pigeons were lumped together with rundown parks, congested streets, and petty crime. 

While pigeon feces have the potential to damage property, and while park visitors’ desire for clean places to sit is reasonable, the health rhetoric so often employed to muster support for culling pigeons, banning feeding, and evicting fanciers is a red herring. I interviewed 15 epidemiologists who specialized in human-animal disease transmission, and all of them said that pigeons were not even on their radars because the risk of infection through casual contact is so low. Epidemiological studies indicate that it is very unlikely that a person can get ill from pigeons unless she literally ingests or breathes in aerosolized feces in an enclosed space.¹³ And a highranking New York Department of Health official told me that he knew of no likely scenarios in which humans would contract a disease from street pigeons. Despite these facts, it is common for municipal agents to dubiously deploy epidemiological frames to garner support for control and extermination campaigns against pigeons and other harmless “pests.” 

While the pigeon may be a paradigmatic pest, it seems that in the city almost any animal can be considered pollution unless it is controlled or civilized. “Invasive species” takes on new meaning. It is notable that the label “rat with wings” is increasingly applied to a variety of birds to signal that they are taboo in domestic spaces: geese, whose feces sully the lawns of business parks and golf courses; gulls, which encroach inland to scavenge; and crows and starlings, which travel in packs and cause a racket in urban and suburban neighborhoods. More than a descriptor, the chimeric metaphor is a discursive resource used to justify extermination efforts.¹⁴ 

This trend of banishing both domestic and wild animals from urban and suburban zones, and the concomitant generalized human intolerance for species that flout our “imaginative geographies,” is precisely the phenomenon that is lamented in the scholarly discourse that I call Nature Lost. Urbanization, it is said, has alienated humans from other life-forms. While animals were once a source of enchantment, inspiration, and even worship, today our natural tone deafness prevents us from finding meaning in the pigeon’s coo or the crow’s caw. Our only means of knowing and appreciating nonhumans is by dominating or denaturing them. 

Or is it? Despite the continued salience of the town/country dichotomy and the Nature Lost narrative, we seem to have entered a historical moment in which American and European cities are being “renatured,” or “greened.” Perhaps most notably, concerns about environmental sustainability have fostered a groundswell of support for urban agriculture. While one sign of the desire for local and organic food is the growth of farmer’s markets and community gardens, many cities have also eased or overturned zoning laws in order to reintroduce animal husbandry. In Chicago, backyard chicken coops have become so popular that one alderwoman’s attempt to ban them in 2007 was met with a sizable public backlash and was quickly shot down by City Hall, which, incidentally, had recently installed a beehive on its “green roof ” at the mayor’s request so that the bees could pollinate flowers. New York City overturned its ban on beehives in 2010 (hundreds of people were allegedly defying the law anyway), and backyard and rooftop chicken coops and beehives have become so popular in the five boroughs that a cottage industry has sprung up to teach and support would-be “urban homesteaders,” who tend to be white, middle class, and college educated. These enthusiasts typically frame their animal practices both as part of a sustainable lifestyle and as a means of “bringing nature back in” to the city.¹⁵ 

As James Gibson notes, the growing collective desire to bring nature back into the city also manifests in the “consecration” of certain wildlife that settle in our streets. In 2011, two red-tailed hawks built a nest on a 12th-floor window ledge of the library at New York University. Within days, they were christened with the names Bobby and Violet, had their own Facebook page, and became stars of a streaming reality-TV show, thanks to a web camera installed by the New York Times. Coming on the heels of New Yorkers’ infatuation with the Fifth Avenue hawks known as Pale Male and Lola (the subjects of numerous books, movies, and pilgrimages), Violet and Bobby gathered a devoted following who anxiously watched online and with binoculars as the pair raised a hatchling named Pip on squirrels and rats captured from the park. The so-called hawk cam was one of hundreds of popular web cameras streaming the trials and tribulations of wild raptors to a global audience. Many viewers, including NYU’s president, indicated that witnessing up close these birds’ efforts to start a family was a rare chance for them to “transcend” their urbanized milieus and commune with “wild nature.”¹⁶ 

The hawk cam is a tiny example of how cities are embracing, or at least making a bit more room for, wildlife. Many municipalities, for instance, are restoring native habitats such as wetlands, reintroducing local species, and creating “wildlife corridors” to mitigate the effects of habitat fragmentation. And it is now common for cities to require office buildings to turn off their lights at night when birds are migrating, so that they do not crash into the glass. These initiatives are key components of broader national efforts to counteract declining biodiversity. 

Akin to the ways that the reconstitution of village life in cities led many sociologists to replace the gloomy Community Lost trope with a redemptive Community Saved thesis,¹⁷ the “greening” of cities has led some environmental writers to supplant the Nature Lost thesis with a discourse that can be called Nature Saved. James Gibson reflects this position in his argument that a “culture of enchantment” is being reawakened in the collective conscience, counteracting the “blasé attitude” so typical of “urbanism as a way of life.” Heeding peregrine falcons in the concrete canyons of the metropolis, and even robins at backyard birdfeeders, can bring charm to our sometimes stark, synthetic environments. A walk in the park can recharge our batteries by invoking the bucolic; a community garden can transform a trash-strewn lot into a miniature edible forest; and chicken coops and beehives can give city slickers a chance to experience rurality without leaving home. Indeed, both “urban homesteaders” and city wildlife enthusiasts routinely appeal to pastoral ideals and claim that activities like beekeeping or birdwatching grant them a sanctuary from the hustle and bustle of urban life and fulfill a need to connect with nature. These (re)connections with particular animals and landscapes, Gibson believes, can lead to a “new covenant between society and nature” in which nature “is allowed to exist on its own terms, for its own sake, valuable simply because it is there.”¹⁸  

Perhaps. But it seems doubtful that environmental consciousnessraising will dismantle the “sociozoologic” classificatory systems that human groups use to rank and sort species based on the roles we expect them to play in society.¹⁹ While some boundaries that separate humans and animals are being disputed or rewritten in the ways that Gibson celebrates, others seem to be becoming more entrenched. We may revere animals, in their own terms, “out there”—in “wild” places like national parks or other environs where there is little human settlement. But the closer we bring other species into our everyday lives, the more our appreciation for them is contingent on the extent to which we can fit them into particular socially defined roles and places in our otherwise human communities. While we may rejoice when a regal pair of red-tailed hawks nest on a cornice, our tune would likely change if they flocked to our sidewalks by the thousands. 

Somewhat ironically, it seems common for “greening” cities to attempt to repatriate fragile species that were lost to urban development while simultaneously ignoring or seeking to evict the pedestrian species that thrive in the built environment. Aside from revealing a cultural bias for “charismatic” and rare species, I believe that this tension also reveals the durability of our belief in—and fetishism of—“pure,” asocial nature. Geese that put off migration to beg us for food, raccoons that invade our trash cans, crows that crack open nuts by dropping them into car traffic, and pigeons that nest on air conditioners and eat from human hands appear to us as a “corruption of natural behavior.”²⁰ In adapting their lifestyles to human habits, these so-called synanthropes subvert our romanticized conceptions of authentic “wild.” 

[…] Although some “homesteaders” receive only negligible edible goods from their bees and chickens and may see them as quasi-pets,²¹ they have successfully framed their practices in the moral language of sustainability. Through this lens, the filth, noise, odor, and minimal but potential dangers (e.g., stings) that these animals pose to neighbors are transmogrified into a picture of bucolic bliss. Unfortunately for pigeon fanciers, they do not fit into this picture. The same cities—and even the same neighborhoods—that hold up “homesteaders” (most of whom are middle class and white) as the vanguard of efforts to make cities “green” frame fanciers (most of whom are working class, and many of whom are minorities or immigrants) as out of step with contemporary urban living, even though fanciers’ animal practices are similar in many ways to keeping chickens or bees and seem to place no greater burden on their neighbors. The city of Chicago’s installation of beehives on the roof of City Hall and its upholding of the right to keep chickens—including noisy roosters—occurred almost before the ink had even dried on the local appeals court’s ruling that it was not a “fundamental right” to keep pigeons in the city.²² 

The Social Experience of Animals 

The ways in which the “greening” of cities is a selective process, privileging certain animal and human groups while marginalizing others, belies the Nature Saved claim that such efforts are simple manifestations of a general human yearning to commune with nature. Only certain animals (and plants) are defined as valued “natural” objects, and only certain “kinds” of people seek connections with these animals. This tension makes clear that cross-species encounters are always grounded in the social world. While this may be a straightforward social fact, it is at odds with everyday folk understandings of “nature” as well as some environmental scholarship. 

Those who trumpet Nature Saved often recapitulate the Nature Lost story that there was once a time in which humans appreciated and worshipped nature because it transcended social life. In this view, totemism expressed a felt sense of literal kinship with animals and fostered a primordial bond with the natural world. But this idea that our relationships with the natural world were somehow “purer” in “traditional” societies, less polluted by social categories, seems more mythical than factual. We can call this the myth of asocial nature, which William Cronon and Michael Bell claim is an artifact of contemporary society’s longing for a “moral preserve” that will serve as an “antidote to the ills of an overly . . . civilized modern world.”²³ 

[…] An important implication of Durkheim’s and Lévi-Strauss’s work is that one must always pay attention to the ways in which cross-species encounters are patterned by the particular contexts in which they are embedded. This has been a major part of this book’s agenda. For instance, while the Nature Lost thesis helps us understand why people today are so apt to loathe street pigeons, it fails to explain why people were so enchanted by pigeons in Piazza San Marco. And while the Nature Saved thesis may partly explain growing interest in urban chicken coops and beehives, it fails to explain why this trend is concurrent with a growing antipathy toward rooftop pigeon coops. By tracing the same animal through a variety of settings, I hope to have shown how understandings of nonhumans are shaped by place, class, race, gender, and other social phenomena. Pigeons embodied cultural heritage in Venice, became “bums” in London’s newly renovated Trafalgar Square, were symbols of ethnicity for Turkish immigrants in Berlin, and were a source of masculine pride for working-class men in New York. 

Hybridity as a Way of Life 

In the end, we are left with a central paradox of urbanized society’s relationship to the environment: we believe that encounters with “nature” transcend social life, yet our experience of nature is profoundly social.²⁴ Seeing the social in nature appears threatening to many environmentalists and nature lovers because it breaches the barrier between sacred and profane worlds. In doing so, it seems to undermine one of the primary warrants for conserving the environment. Indeed, the asocial-nature ideal has played an important role, especially in the United States, in convincing governments to protect endangered species and set aside “pristine” tracts of land as preserves. However, as William Cronon has noted, by reproducing “the dualism that sets humanity and nature at opposite poles,” this quixotic standard does not offer a blueprint of “what an ethical, sustainable, honorable human place in nature might look like.”²⁵ As James Gibson acknowledges, notions of purity can foster apathy for the “hybrid” landscapes most of us actually live in. As intimated above, notions of the “wild” as untainted by society can also impede appreciation for the “hybrid” animals (i.e., synanthropes) that inhabit our hybrid landscapes. 

Seeing the social in nature need not threaten our desire to associate with and protect nonhuman life. For instance, the Turkish immigrants’ sense of primordial attachment to their pigeons, and to nature in general, resulted from locating nature within the social category of nation. And in Piazza San Marco, it was precisely because the street pigeons there had been designated as cultural objects that visitors, many of whom claimed to dislike pigeons, delighted in feeding them. Interacting with pigeons connected them to the urban milieu, rendering the space a personally meaningful place. 

[…] The journalist Robert Sullivan writes that nature is prospering in cities like New York. The five boroughs contain a greater variety of habitats than the surrounding suburban and rural areas, with their uniform tracts of grass and fields, and Jamaica Bay (Queens) contains more species of birds than Yellowstone and Yosemite Parks combined. Most of us have not noticed this nature, he argues, because it is not the kind we are looking for — it is less precious, less “pure.”²⁶ Who would bother to detect the biodiversity lurking in interstitial spaces such as highway embankments, particularly if they are strewn with litter? These species, many of which have learned to adapt their behaviors to the habits of people, powerfully demonstrate the extent to which the social and the natural are literally — not just conceptually—intertwined. 

Given the pace and scope of human-induced ecological disruptions, as well as efforts to save or restore open spaces in and around urban regions, ecologists predict a future where more and more species will fashion their survival strategies around humans. Coyotes and other predatory animals, which most of us think “belong” in the country, now regularly encroach the city limits and find our streets to be suitable habitats. Whether or not humans feel that we have any ethical responsibility for the dependent masses of urban animals that we haphazardly abet, we should recognize that their presence does not reflect the incomplete removal of nature from the city but rather the progressive adaptation of nonhumans to an artificial environment. Poison will not stop them. While the idea of the city as a setting devoid of human encounters with nonhumans was always a mirage, the rise of synanthropy, the “greening” of cities, and the blurring of urban and rural boundaries as a result of sprawl shatters the hackneyed “imaginative geography” of the city. If “urbanism as a way of life” described a peculiar set of interactions and attitudes that made the social order of the city distinct from the country, then perhaps we should now speak of “hybridity as a way of life” to denote the fact that nonhuman species are regular participants in what Jane Jacobs called the “intricate sidewalk ballet” of the urban social order. 

Learning to appreciate the “contaminated” biodiversity of our hybrid landscapes, an attitude which might be better fostered by seeing the social in nature rather than holding species up to an asocial template, can expand the terrain of environmental conservation and may even offer clues for how to model more sustainable human and nonhuman cohabitation. Perhaps such appreciation could even begin with that most pedestrian creature of all, the pigeon. 

References     

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Reprinted by permission of the University of Chicago Press. 

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