Pigeon at Waterloo Station, 2015

Dear Readers, my friend A sent me this article today, and it was timely in a number of ways. Firstly, regular readers will know that I have a great deal of sympathy for the poor old beleaguered city pigeon, something that I think I’ve inherited from my Mum. She was always a champion of the underdog, and (with apologies to those of you who’ve heard this story before) that included the humble pigeon.

About thirty years ago, my mother was sitting in Finsbury Square in London having her lunch. As usual, she was sharing it with the pigeons. One had thread tangled around one of its feet. As my mother watched it hobbling about, she felt that she had to do something. She had a pair of nail scissors in her bag, but being on the verge of retirement she was not quick enough to catch the bird. Plucking up her courage, she approached a besuited chap sitting on a nearby bench.

“Excuse me,” she said, “but that poor pigeon is all tangled up. If you could just hold it for a minute, I could cut the thread off very easily. Will you help me?”

He looked at her for a long minute, as if trying to work out if she was serious.

“Touch that?” he said. “You must be mad”.

And so, in a single exchange, we see that the world is divided into those who think of pigeons as living creatures, and those who think of them as ‘feathered rats’.

So it was with great interest that I read that there is now an informal organisation in London called The London Pigeon String Foot and Rescue. It teaches people how to catch pigeons and ‘de-string’ their feet – pigeons often become entangled with human hair and other kinds of twine, which cuts off the blood supply to their feet. It is clearly painful, but it can also lead to necrosis and the pigeon can even lose its feet. If the injury is not too severe, the bird can go on its way once ‘de-stringed’, but if it’s more serious, the organisation takes the birds in for rehabilitation.

It takes a bit of courage to be a pigeon de-stringer, though – as Mum found out, people believe that the birds are ‘flying rats’, or ‘full of disease’. Clearly they aren’t rats, and as the article above points out, between 1941 and 2004 there were 13 recorded cases of global deaths from pigeon-related disease, most of them involving pigeon-keepers. On the other hand, there are 59,000 cases of fatal rabies every single year, most transmitted by dogs.

I sometimes think that pigeons don’t actually ‘count’ as animals. Some parents allow children to harass pigeons by chasing them and stamping at them, something I’m pretty sure they wouldn’t let them do if the animals were puppies or kittens. They really are close to the bottom of the pack, probably only just above rats and mice. And maybe it’s not surprising that the people in the article who sympathise most with the pigeons are homeless people, and the lonely. Pigeons are intelligent birds and they will certainly learn to appreciate people who feed them and are kind to them.

I remember this scene as if it were yesterday.

I was once on a bus travelling along Euston Road, when it came to a sudden halt. There in the middle of the road was an elderly lady. She wore plastic bags over her sandals, and was shouting to herself, occasionally stopping dead to harangue some invisible enemy. But circling over her head was a flock of pigeons, accompanying her as she walked like an aerial guard of honour. When she finally slumped on to a bench, they descended around her as she pulled bread from her pockets and began to feed them, gesturing at particular birds and admonishing others. As the bus pulled away, I looked back to see her finally settling back, her face calm, as the birds pecked around her feet. I had no doubt that the pigeons knew her, just as she knew them, and that there was a kind of fellowship between them. We are all just struggling animals, trying to survive the vicissitudes of life, but it takes a hard-earned wisdom to recognise the fact.