Pigeons Are Punishment

Originally published August 1st, 2002

It is a widespread belief among religious fanatics and scientists alike that the birds came first, and humans afterwards. This may generally be the truth, but I don't believe it applies to pigeons. Consider this: have you ever seen a pigeon outside a man-made environment, like, in the wilderness? I for one certainly haven't, and I'm quite convinced that pigeons came only after man created cities.

As I see it, there are two possible explanations:

1. The Religious Explanation: God devised pigeons as a means of punishment for man. Probably after the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrha he wanted to make sure that people would never again feel comfortable enough in a city to repeat the sins committed there, and he created the pigeons as a means to make the city dwellers' lives more miserable, as a constant reminder of their past sins.
2. The Scientific Explanation: pigeons are not the result of basic evolution; in fact they are mutants. The mutation started as the result of the toxic wastes and fumes that are omnipresent in every modern city, and caused the pigeon as we know it today to emerge.

Either way it doesn't make you very comfortable, does it?

But then, pigeons are not there to make you feel comfortable. They are there to be comfortable themselves. Basically, all they do all day is eat, spread disease, and breed. And they're quite good at all of these: they can survive for long periods without food, they're remarkably resistant against diseases themselves, and they multiply at speeds that make rabbits turn green with envy.

I saw a documentation on pigeons a while ago on cable TV. Pigeons don't even bother to build nests. They may fetch five or six twigs and align them in a roughly circular form, but basically they just drop lots of their own excrement around the area where they lay eggs to make sure the eggs don't roll off. Ever entered an empty building that's inhabited by pigeons? Well, don't. At least take a breathing apparatus and wear protective clothing. It's about the most disgusting thing I've ever seen.

In 1993, a team of scientists and architects entered one of the Flak (anti-aircraft gun) towers that the Nazis built in Vienna in 1943-44. That particular tower had been damaged by an explosion in 1946 and hadn't been entered since then. Due to the explosion, a section of the tower had been completely sealed off from the outside world, with no way to get in or out. In that section, they found a pigeon colony of a couple of hundred pigeons. The colony must have had its origins in a number of pigeons who had been locked into the tower after the explosion in 1946. Still, more than 45 years later, with basically no food inside the tower, the pigeons had still been able to survive in absolute darkness. I guess they had turned to cannibalism, but it shows just how resistant these birds are.

A city councillor from Basle, Switzerland, who was interviewed on that TV program also talked about how difficult it was to get rid of the pigeons. He said that one year the pigeon plague had become so bad that the city had begun to poison pigeons on a large scale. The number had been reduced to about 10% of the original population. The next year, without the poison, the number was back to normal within a few months.

A pigeon's daily life consists of two things: finding food or breeding. If they don't have to do the former, they do the latter. Basically, this makes them like the famous Tribbles on Star Trek: feed a pigeon, and soon you'll have three pigeons. If you don't feed pigeons, they don't die, but they'll spend more time looking for food and less time breeding. The Basle city councillor said in the same interview that by starting an information campaign telling citizens not to feed the pigeons, the Basle pigeon population went back to less than a quarter of the original number in less than a year -- quite impressive considering this was achieved totally without poison.

The problem is that the pigeons are not as dumb as they look.

Ever wondered why whenever you're sitting on a park bench, a pigeon will invariably approach you and peck around on the ground, even though there's nothing edible to be seen? Basically, they're doing this because they know that people will think, "what a poor pigeon, it's so hungry and doesn't have anything to eat" and feed them. It's pure tactics. In one of his books, the scientist Paul Watzlawick points out the case of the limping pigeons, telling how in one village all the pigeons suddenly started to limp whenever they were near humans, but walked perfectly normally when they thought they were unobserved. They had learned that limping pigeons were more likely top be fed, so they started to limp. I guess this makes pigeons one of the few animals that are actually capable of lying.

They also have built-in watches and probably some kind of food radar. Every Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday at around 2 p.m., a huge swarm of pigeons gathers on the roofs of the houses about half a mile from where I live. It's a truly frightening spectacle, like directly taken out of Hitchcock's Birds. Briefly afterwards, an old woman will emerge from one of the buildings and deposit the contents of a bag of birdseeds on the pavement, after which the pigeons will dive down and fight each other to the death over the seeds. The uncanny thing is that the pigeons seem to know exactly when the woman appears, even when she is off schedule. According to my observations, the pigeons gather on the roofs about 10-15 minutes before she appears. They don't gather if she's not coming, and they come later if she's coming later.

Which just asserts my belief stated earlier, that they are indeed some kind of punishment sent directly by God.

The opinions expressed here are those of Horst Prillinger and his only. Please note that while he is taking great care to ensure that all the information displayed here is correct, he cannot be made responsible for any factual errors that may occur. Under no circumstances is his employer in any way responsible for anything published on this site. Links posted on this page are here for information purposes only. Under no circumstances can the owner of this web site, Horst Prillinger, be made responsible for any content on the linked pages.