The bird book industry is booming† There is no country or region in the world without a beautifully illustrated guide to identify all birds. If you are only interested in finches, woodpeckers or gulls, those books also exist. The interest in birds has even gone so far that there is a market for literature that helps you identify their droppings. However, all those bird guides get stuck with the question ‘What flies (or poops) there?’ and ignore the fun you can get from watching a bird for more than a few minutes. So should Rosemary Mosco, author and illustrator of A Pocket Guide to Pigeon Watching, have thought. Her book encourages you to study the world’s most maligned bird – the urban pigeon – in all its versatility. Nothing stands in our way, because “it’s free and pigeons are everywhere (except Antarctica),” writes Mosco, who illustrated the book himself with cartoonish drawings.
The book is infectious. Now I don’t miss an opportunity to observe pigeons. The variation in plumage, from gray blue and ash brown to deep black, mixed with a varying amount of white, makes each pigeon group a living genetics laboratory. They reproduce year round, which is the most fun. The mating is a masterpiece of acrobatics. The male balances on the back of the female who excitedly spreads the feathers of her behind. The keen observer at that moment has a beautiful view of the pink mucous membrane of her cloaca, and also sees the male maneuver his tail under that of the female to deposit his semen right there.
That the mating dance even for streetwise city pigeons is a vulnerable moment, when attentive Rotterdammers on the Maasboulevard, waiting in front of the barriers of the Boerengatbrug, saw a pigeon couple doing a cheerful round dance last spring: “One was very busy continuously climbing on the other”, emailed eyewitness Saskia Uit den Bogaard. Then the descending bridge section ended the reproductive process: “I saw the pigeon convulse a few more, but realized that there was nothing more that could be done.”
Although the victim was crushed between the bridge and the road surface, I was able to save him miraculously intact for the ‘Dead animals with a story’ collection of the Natural History Museum. There it appeared on the cutting table from the swollen testicles that the female had escaped with a fright.
Rosemary Moscow. A Pocket Guide to Pigeon Watching† Workman Publishing
A version of this article also appeared in NRC on the morning of February 16, 2022