Pigeon Politics

We must be wily like the pigeons.
—Toni Negri

On June 22, 1966, an article appeared in the New York Times that was to make (pigeon) history. In it, Thomas P. Hoving, the city’s parks commissioner, harshly condemned the vandalizing and defiling of Bryant Park. Hoving explicitly singled out “homosexuals,” who he said were “pulling faces” at other park patrons, and pointed out the extraordinary number of “winos” congregating in the green spaces. The article described a public park in crisis, hopelessly overrun by homeless people and shamelessly misused as a garbage dump. This was followed by a subheading: “And then there are the pigeons.” Hoving declared this heretofore blameless bird species to be New York’s “most persistent vandal . . . the pigeon eats our ivy, our grass, our flowers and is a health threat . . . But everyone seems to want to feed them . . . It’s impossible to stop the pigeon-feeders.”

After the author’s appeal for a “clean-up”—more desperate than hopeful—a phrase appeared for the first time that was destined to follow pigeons everywhere they went: “Commissioner Hoving called the pigeon ‘a rat with wings.’” Woody Allen’s 1980 film Stardust Memories quoted this New York expression, vaulting it into global circulation.

In no time, the public image of pigeons was transformed. Once the epitome of the delicious, the beautiful, the wholesome, and the good, in the course of the twentieth century they were increasingly viewed in more and more Western cities as an urban plague: nasty, ugly, and germ-infested. But how did this transformation come about?

One important material reason for the high esteem these birds enjoyed was likely their ability to produce what is perhaps the world’s best fertilizer: pigeon droppings have been valued by agrarian societies across time and space. In the most remote corners of the globe, dovecotes and pigeon towers stand as monuments to this esteem. Generally regarded as peaceful, monogamous, and handsome, pigeons—in this context called “doves”—became the symbol of the Holy Spirit in Christian mythology, which for its part could draw on existing traditions of dove veneration. In Catholic lore they were considered the only creatures on earth so pure that no demon could ever possess them. Doves are among the earliest domesticated animals and have accompanied human societies since there have been written records. Homer, Socrates, and Aristotle exhibit an intimate knowledge of how doves live, and they wrote about their selective breeding and domestication. Visual, sculptural, and literary depictions of the relationship between humans and doves go back five thousand years. Some authors trace their domestication to the beginning of sedentary societies in and around the Near East and North Africa ten thousand years ago.

The pigeon is regarded as what is called a synanthrope, or companion species. Interacting with humans and their buildings has proved to be highly advantageous for pigeons. It appears that the earthen and stone structures of the first human dwellings resembled the original habitat of pigeons so much that they were readily commandeeredas nesting sites. Pigeons, that is, do not build nests; they set up accommodations in existing nooks and crannies.

And since pigeons hardly seemed to care about the difference between nature and culture, they got comfortable around humans and showed little fear of them.

These traits peculiar to pigeons were the prerequisite for human interventions. Their rapid reproduction cycles made them ideal breeding stock; Charles Darwin himself devoted many years to observing them. Pigeons, it turns out, are fertile longer and more often than most other animals. Thus, they became mythical beasts in various cultures, standing for gentleness and monogamy, for fertility, and for the good as such. No wonder doves were popular sacrificial animals and temple birds, consecrated first to Aphrodite and later to Venus . . .

The same economic processes that increasingly tarnished the dove’s halo also led to an explosion in pigeon populations in the world’s urban zones. The Fordist postwar boom bestowed on them an increased food supply in the form of litter, and the advent of shopping streets and pedestrian zones provided them with an abundance of natural/artificial habitat. As they had done in the earliest human settlements, pigeons also made themselves at home in the new metropolises and took possession of the city. After losing their erstwhile economic value for human beings in the course of the twentieth century, their status changed appreciably too. Halved and laid on a wound or eaten in a soup, for example, the dove was long considered healthful, ideal nourishment for the sick or hospitalized. Well into the 1950s, dove was a weekly fixture on the menu in half of Vienna’s hospitals, a bird thought to be so pure that it would even heal the sick. But increasingly it was perceived as a disease carrier.

Home interiors grew more and more aseptic, and city exteriors ever more groomed. Higher standards of hygiene made private individuals worry about the cleanliness of their window ledges and backyards. Businesspeople and local politicians fretted about the aesthetics of public shopping areas. And although squirrels spread more pathogens than pigeons do, the latter came to be seen as “germ factories.” That people are so ready to believe this points to a symbolic urban order in which visions of disciplined city spaces merge with commercial demands for sanitized zones of consumption at the intersection of orderly aesthetics and biosocial hygiene. In such spaces, not only pigeons but other figures perceived as parasitical and useless—punks, beggars, junkies, graffiti artists, the homeless—become disturbers of the tamed cityscape and the regular flow of business.

Even if the German Federal Supreme Court has ruled that pigeons are definitively not pests, building cleaners and similar stakeholders with an interest in cleansing the city of pigeons still like to claim that they are. Consequently, in the fight against pigeons, facades have been militarized with spikes and nets. Pest exterminators are ready to assist. Eco-moralistic signs in parks showing rats wearing nasty scowls pull off a semiotic short circuit to another pest whose status seems unambiguous: feed a pigeon and you feed a rat.