Birthday Hummingbird!

Seeing cool birds is always wonderful, and especially so on a milestone birthday. The only time I specifically planned for a good bird on my birthday was when I turned 60 on 11/11/11—Russ and I went to the Grand Canyon to see my lifer California Condor. 

I did a Big Year in 2013 and added one cool species on my birthday that I didn’t see at all the rest of that year, a Hook-billed Kite in Anzalduas Park in Texas. This one wasn’t a lifer—I’d seen them before in Costa Rica and Guatemala—but that birthday sighting remains the only time I’ve seen one in the U.S.

I saw an amazing 16 lifers on my birthday in 2016, when I was in Uganda. I’m sure I’ll never do better than that numerically, but I’m afraid they were eclipsed by the fact that that was also the day I got to see Mountain Gorillas. 

This year a lifer wasn’t in the picture at all, but the bird of the day was pretty darned cool—a Rufous Hummingbird who’s been coming to my bird feeders since Monday. She showed up on the next block of Peabody Street, at the feeders of a wonderful woman named Jenny at some point before Halloween. When my neighbor Jeanne found out about it, she told me and set out her own feeders. 

Of course I had to set out my feeders, too. 

Hanging out in three different yards has made it more complicated for birders descending on the neighborhood to add her to their county and state lists, but birds like to have options. I’m making my sugar water using a rounded 1/3 cup of sugar per cup of water. This is on the strong side but still within the natural sugar concentration range of flower nectar. Hummingbirds need enough water to metabolize sugar, but the cold, wet weather we’re having right now means she needs more calories relative to water.   

She showed up quite a few times over the course of the day yesterday, but she’s skittish when people are gawking at her, so I set my good camera on a tripod and left it on the porch to record video while I watched from a distance indoors. I got one really good video of her arriving at the feeder and pigging out. That video is in slow motion so it lasts exactly 3 minutes, allowing us to enjoy her movements in a way our mere human eyes can’t resolve in real time.   

Hummingbirds are of course extremely rare vagrants in Duluth in November. I had another female Rufous Hummingbird back in 2004—she showed up on November 16 and stayed in my yard until December 3, surviving a blizzard and a night with temps plunging into single digits. 

She left at mid-morning on a sunny, mild day after filling up starting before dawn, so I’m sure she managed to get pretty far, though I devoutly hoped she’d run into more yards here and there where people were still keeping out their hummingbird feeders with reasonably fresh sugar water.  

Late hummingbirds are so rare that of course few people leave feeders out for them—it’s been 17 years since that last one, which isn’t much of a payoff for keeping a feeder out and the water reasonably fresh for two months after hummingbirds are essentially gone. 

One rehab center was telling people earlier this fall to take in hummingbird feeders so they don’t create what they called a “food island” that could keep them north too long. But that's ridiculous. The hummingbirds that breed here, Ruby-throateds, simply don’t stick around later than each individual needs to get its body ready for the long journey—their migration is timed exactly when food is extremely abundant, and even the richest garden with lots of feeders as well is not enough to make any linger. 

The only times I’ve ever had a Ruby-throat in early October, it stopped momentarily, pigged out, and immediately moved on. Those late Ruby-throats are young birds hatched late in the season who needed longer to get in shape, or adult females who nested late and again needed more time to get their bodies ready for the rigors of migration. My feeder was just an emergency wayside, not a "food trap."  

No matter how long people leave out their feeders, stragglers after early Oct. up here never include Ruby-throated Hummingbirds. Late hummers are always vagrants from other ranges who simply chance upon our feeders and wander on when they get their body fat where it belongs. Some of these hummingbird stragglers do die, of course, just as do birds in our yards during every other season. But of the cases I know about, the deaths invariably happened when well-meaning people trapped the birds to “rescue” them. Now trapping hummingbirds to overwinter them indoors or transfer them to where people think they belong is strictly prohibited. 

The superb writer and ornithologist Scott Weidensaul has researched this issue extensively. His and an abundance of other research is showing that Rufous Hummingbirds are extending their winter range into the eastern US, perhaps as a result of habitat loss and climate change issues in their traditional range in Mexico. And some of these birds are surviving winters in OH and PA, and even returning the next year. In 2014, a banded hummingbird in State College, PA, survived air temperatures of -9º F and wind chills of -36º F. Remember—Rufous Hummingbirds breed in the Rocky Mountains in Alaska. They are survivors. 

Birds understand their lives and their needs far better than we arrogant humans do. When I had a chickadee with a deformed bill and missing toes, I trusted that the little guy would do what it needed to survive as long as possible. A year and a half later, the overgrown bill tip had broken off and the little chickadee found a mate and successfully fledged a brood. 

When my previous November Rufous Hummingbird stayed on until December, I trusted that she’d move on when she was ready, and she did. This year’s hummingbird in my neighborhood may not make it, but there's a good chance she will, to move on as soon as her body tells her it’s ready. Her destiny belongs to her, not me.

Top Ten Reasons to Relish the Number Seventy

A lot of times on my birthday, I look for the top ten reasons why the new number representing my age is a cool one. So here goes: 

1. Seventy is the smallest weird number—that is, a natural number that is not semiperfect but is abundant. In and of itself, that's a fun, weird fact that any former junior high math teacher couldn't resist explaining. So here goes:

Mathematically, a number is perfect if, when you add each one of its factors except itself, you get the number. Six is the smallest perfect number because its factors—1, 2, and 3—add up to 6. Twenty-eight is the next perfect number because its factors—1, 2, 4, 7, and 14—add up to 28. 

A number is abundant if, when you add each of its factors except the number itself, you get a sum larger than the number itself. The smallest abundant number is 12— its factors, 1, 2, 3, 4, and 6, add up to 16, which is larger than 12.

A number is semiperfect if it’s both abundant and you can add up some of its factors to get the number itself. That smallest abundant number, twelve, is also semiperfect because some of its factors, namely 1, 2, 3, and 6, add up to 12. 

Seventy is abundant—its factors—1, 2, 5, 7, 10, 14, and 35—add up to 74. But 70 is not semiperfect because no combination of those factors adds up to exactly 70. So that makes 70 a weird number. And 70 happens to be both the smallest weird number and the only weird number that is a possible age in a person’s lifetime. I doubt if Paul Simon was thinking about weird numbers and synonyms of "weird" when he wrote the song "Old Friends," with the line, “How terribly strange to be 70.” Well, maybe he did—he is the guy who also wrote the song "When Numbers Get Serious." And mathematically, that line in "Old Friends" is a true statement.   

2. And speaking of Paul Simon, my favorite songwriter of all time, the fact that he specifically named the age of seventy in one of his most beautiful songs is a Good Thing in and of itself. 

3. “Three score and ten,” or 70 years, is the nominal length of a human life in the Bible. Of course, that same Bible says Adam lived to be 930 and  Methuselah to 969, so in Biblical terms I may well have some time left. 

4. 70 is the atomic number of the rare earth metal ytterbium, named for the Swedish village Ytterby where Swiss chemist Jean Charles Galissard de Marignac discovered it.  Ytterbium is most useful in the extremely rare situation where you can use it in a game of Scrabble. 

5. Seventy is probably the age of the youngest people who remember when the name of Armistice Day was changed to Veterans Day, in 1954. My Grandpa fought in World War I, which ended at the armistice, on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month. In honor of my most beloved veteran, to this day I call my birthday Armistice Day.

6. U.S. copyrights now normally last for an author’s life plus 70 years. 

7. In Roman numerals, 70 is LXX, which is my initial plus a couple of kisses.   

8. The 70th bird on my lifelist is a wonderfully cool one, the Belted Kingfisher.

9. The 70th day of each year, March 11 (except in Leap Years, when it’s March 10), falls at the most joyous and hopeful time of the annual cycle, when spring migration is just starting to kick in. 

10. I started birding on March 2, 1975. Exactly 70 days later, May 11, was the first time I ever had at least 10 lifers in a single day, and among them were my very first warblers. 

Of course, since my birthday is 11/11, my top ten lists always includes eleven items. 

11. Most obviously, the alternative to turning 70 is not turning 70.

Last Day in My Sixties

 

Today is the very last day that I will ever be in my sixties. It sounds terribly strange to be turning 70 (something Paul Simon noted back when he was in his 20s), but not nearly as scary as acknowledging that tomorrow I’ll be entering my eighth decade. Based on my sixties, and every other decade I’ve been through, there are scary times ahead. But based on my sixties, and every other decade I’ve been through, there should also be lovely, exciting times ahead. 

When I started thinking about it, I realized that my sixties have been my most wonderful decade so far. The Cubs won the World Series—something that had never happened since my Grandpa was a little boy.  

I'm having more fun with bird photography than I ever thought possible. I just got a mirrorless camera with a 100-500 mm lens that is lighter weight than my old camera with the 100-400 mm lens, but so far, that slightly reduced weight hasn’t mattered much. Even in my dotage, my ankle, knee, elbow, and shoulder joints are hanging in there, allowing me to lug the camera pretty much everywhere, taking photos and videos of my new baby grandson as well as of birds.  

Speaking of which, even though I had no experience with being a grandmother for almost 69 years, I seem to be adapting well to the novel situation—I’m having SO much fun with the little guy! He can’t be vaccinated so far, so protecting him from Covid has been tricky, but I seem to have lucked into (so far) a best-case scenario. My daughter and son-in-law came to live with us in April 2020, had their baby here, and now have bought a house right here in our city, just 7 minutes away. I’m providing childcare 5 days a week while they work from home now. It’s been wonderfully gratifying getting to introduce Walter to birds, squirrels, and other natural beings.  

I was in my 20s when I first started birding. That first decade, much of the joy went far beyond seeing so many birds for the very first time—it was a whole new world of discovery. Even the mammals I’d known for a long time were suddenly new—in Chicago and southern Michigan, the backyard squirrels turned out to belong to two different species, Eastern Gray and Eastern Fox squirrels. Discovering the existence of adorable red squirrels the first time Russ and I went to Port Wing, Wisconsin, was truly magical. 

In my 30s and 40s, I was still discovering new things, but now at a slower pace except when I stepped into the whole new world of the tropics—it was when I was 49 that I first went to Costa Rica and to Trinidad and Tobago. In my 50s, I went back to Costa Rica twice, and got to go to Guatemala and Mexico as well. I was definitely slowing down a bit—the 14-year-old guide assigned to lead me to a Horned Guan in Guatemala when I was 55 was thrilled about how old I was—he exclaimed that I was even older than his grandmother! We were lugging my spotting scope along but that was hardly the real reason we were so far behind the men in their 20s and 30s who made it up the mountain much faster. Mentally I wasn’t slowing down, at least not that I could notice, but I was losing that hunger—the fire in my belly—to add ever more lifers.  

But of course I will always love seeing new birds, and I started out my sixties on 11/11/11 trying to see a truly spectacular and long-yearned-for lifer, a California Condor, in the Grand Canyon. 

It was cool enough that I got to go birding, for the first time ever, in Cuba, Peru, Uganda, Panama, Germany, Austria, and Hungary, but the real thrill was seeing a handful of species I’d specifically yearned for for many years—birds such as the Cuban Tody... 

...Andean Cock-of-the-Rock...

... Marvelous Spatuletail...

...Harpy Eagle... 

...Great Tit...

... and European Robin. 

Adding birds to my lifelist wasn’t the point—I was even thrilled to see an uncountable Chukar wandering in my own neighborhood. 

It was during my 60s that I did a Lower-48 Big Year—that is, going out to see as many bird species as possible in a single calendar year. And I was invited to speak at a lot of really cool birding events, including at Harvard! (That was for the Brookline Bird Club which meets at Harvard as a matter of course, but still!!) 

I wrote 6 books during my sixties, including the Field Guide to the Birds of Minnesota for the American Birding Association (now in its second printing!) and one for National Geographic--just a pocket guide to birds but it really impressed my daughter (something not easy to do). 

Now I'm almost done with another book, my first to appear while I'm in my seventies.  

In every decade of my life I’ve lost beloved relatives and friends and pets. I’ve also had some health challenges here and there which seem to be accelerating. But that has made me appreciate what a gift each day really is. I have a great dog, my husband is doing well, and right this moment there’s a cool little Rufous Hummingbird visiting some feeders, including mine, right here on Peabody Street. 

And when she’s not in sight, I’m still taking great pleasure in my little chickadees. Seriously. Who could ask for more?  

Birds in the News: A Conversation with KUMD's Lisa Johnson

On Friday morning, I was interviewed by KUMD's Lisa Johnson about three issues: the Audubon Naturalist Society dropping "Audubon" from its name, the recent news story about two cases of California Condors producing live offspring without a male condor involved, and New Zealand selecting a bat as its Bird of the Year. You can listen to the 16-minute interview, and find some other interviews between Lisa and me, at this KUMD's Environment and Outdoors page. 

Lisa has been one of the very best interviewers I've dealt with in my long career, and I've been interviewed on a lot of local, state, and national radio and television news programs. Lisa always does her homework, so her questions are always intelligent and informed (seriously—very few people in media have her knowledge about nature and environmental issues), and her quick wit is SO fun to engage with!   

KUMD has been bought by WDSE and will no longer be part of the University of Minnesota-Duluth beginning next month. No word yet on whether they will continue to air For the Birds. 

A Conversation with Rosemary Mosco, Part 5

Three animals have been especially important to militaries around the world: horses, dogs, and pigeons. Rosemary Mosco, author of A Pocket Guide to Pigeon Watching: Getting to Know the World’s Most Misunderstood Bird, talked with me about how pigeons have served in many militaries. 

Yeah! They don’t have to deal with traffic signs, they can just kind of fly straight away. And they can also fly –it’s hard to find exact numbers on how fast they can go, but they can go 60 mph kind of topping out. They’re incredibly fast in terms of a mechanism for getting information from one place to another. You can see why they were so useful in wartime. And a lot of those wartime pigeons would get hit by shrapnel or attacked by a hawk, and they would just keep going. They would make it, and would make repeat missions. It’s really incredible. 

I always found their service ironic, since doves are symbols of anti-militarism while we use hawks, which have never helped any military win any battle or save any lives ever, to symbolize militarism. And even more ironically, doves are useful in wartime only because all they want to do is just go home. 

That’s the thing. When we talk about pigeons racing or pigeon carriers, or whatever, what we need to remember is that they only go one way. You can’t have a pigeon fly somewhere and then attach a note and send it back. You really have to drive it back or shuttle it back, because what they’re really good at is flying home and navigating home. What they would do in wars since time immemorial—Genghis Khan was using pigeons in battles—and especially in World War I and II, we would basically ship a pigeon from the U.K. to the front and then attach a message when required, it would fly back to some guy’s loft in his backyard, at a shoestore or whatever, and then he would take the message off and alert the proper authorities. 

Rosemary told the story of one of the most famous pigeon heroes in the world, Cher Ami. 

Yeah—that part was really tricky to write. Cher Ami was a World War I hero pigeon who was released by this battalion called the Lost Battalion that went behind enemy lines and found themselves trapped in this one particular spot and they were being hit by friendly fire. So they wanted to get the message to the folks who were bombing them, “Hey, we’re friends! Stop hitting us—we’re sustaining heavy casualties.” They released one pigeon and I think they forgot to put the message canister on it, and then they released a second pigeon. Cher Ami was released in the skies and was immediately shot, and they thought, there goes our hope. But Cher Ami made it with wounds to her foot and breast—made it and delivered the message that basically said, “What the heck are you doing? Stop shooting at us,” and saved tons and tons of lives. It’s a really interesting story but it’s tricky because so many of these war stories get retold and retold and facts get added, so it was really hard to find a version of that story that was really correct. In particular, Cher Ami was probably a female, and a lot of places where you read about Cher Ami, she’s described as a he. So I had to reach out to the Smithsonian, which has the stuffed version of Cher Ami, and they’re pretty sure she’s a female, but DNA tests are pending till the end of the pandemic, which I thought was a wild story. 

Rosemary’s book talks about how pigeons find their way to deliver important messages. 

It’s so fascinating. Before I started reading about this, I thought, when I want to get home, I open my GPS. So probably pigeons just GPS in their head. But they really use so many different cues, some of which I feel we haven’t fully understood at this point, which we haven’t even identified. It’s hard to say exactly what a pigeon is doing when it’s trying to find home. We know, for example, that they’re using the sun. They look at the sun all day and they learn where they are in relation to the position of the sun, but sometimes it’s hard to see the sun. Scientists have covered up birds’ eyes, put little fogging lenses or whatever so they can see if the birds can find their way home without seeing the sun, and they definitely can. So we think they can also sense the earth’s magnetic field. There’s some evidence that they’re smelling their way home—that there’s an olfactory connection, too. They also use landmarks, too. So some pigeons are definitely looking around and saying oh, well I live near that particular hill. They also hear sounds that are deeper than the sounds we can hear, the infrasounds. So there’s some evidence that they’re listening and hearing their way home. But it’s honestly so complicated, and different pigeons have their own ways of finding their way home, which is certainly true of humans as well. It’s just such a complicated and fascinating issue.

Complicated and fascinating, yet ever charming, is an apt description of both Rosemary Mosco and her wonderful book, A Pocket Guide to Pigeon Watching: Getting to Know the World’s Most Misunderstood Bird, available just about anywhere books are sold. And remember: there are still five shopping days until Veterans’ Day. 

A Conversation with Rosemary Mosco, Part 4

In A Pocket Guide to Pigeon Watching: Getting to Know the World’s Most Misunderstood Bird, Rosemary Mosco talks a lot about how important pigeons have been to people: for food, carrying messages, producing guano for fertilizer, and racing. As tasty as pigeons apparently are, we’ve never been able to breed them as prolifically as we breed domestic chickens, turkeys, or ducks. Rosemary explained:

A lot of what they do is kind of mediated by these particular quirks that they have. For example, with meat, we definitely used to eat tons and tons and tons of pigeons, but they have to take good care of their babies. You can’t just take their chicks away and raise them like you can with chickens. You have to have the mom pigeon feeding them pigeon milk, which the mom and the dad produce in their throat. They’re caring for their young, so it’s a little bit tougher to raise large quantities of them, so instead, we switched to chickens, and this homing tendency is a little tough to overcome so we switched to Internet. So there are a lot of reasons why they became a little less useful over time for sure.  

Rosemary’s book does a better job of explaining the unique quirks of pigeon biology than most high school and college textbooks do. We talked about just one element of it: 

If you look at a pigeon’s circulatory system, you’ll notice that they have this wild mesh of veins that’s all around their neck. It kind of makes sense when you think about a pigeon poofing up its neck. It’s this thing called the collar plexus for short. It’s this region that can help a pigeon swell up and do its poofy neck thing, but also can help it stay cool or stay warm. It can exchange heat through that collar plexus. And it’s just one of those things about a pigeon that is kind of familiar but really alien that they have, like an entire branching circulatory system all around that poofy neck. 

I asked her about B.F. Skinner’s famous work with pigeons.

Pigeons are surprisingly smart, and also surprisingly not smart.  They’re both familiar and alien in terms of their minds, which I think is really interesting. For a long time, people thought that birds were not very smart, partly because if you look at their brains which are kind of small, they don’t look as wrinkled as our brains, and we usually think of wrinkly brains as a smart thing—lots of folds and lots of cells and lots of intelligence. But that’s because their brain anatomy is just totally, totally different. They don’t have a neocortex, but they do have this thing called a mesopallium that has cells that act in almost the same way. 

A lot of birds are really smart. There are parrots that can memorize tons of words, there are ravens that will knock snow off roofs onto passersby and target their hits with precision. And then there are pigeons, which will have their moments of being less intelligent. For example, if you swap a pigeon’s babies with another pigeon’s babies, they won’t notice. They can’t recognize their children. But at the same time, people have trained them to do unbelievably cool things. B.F. Skinner trained them to play ping pong, and we’ve trained them to recognize Indian dance versus martial arts, and we’ve trained them to tell cancerous breast tissue from uncancerous breast tissue looking at medical slides. And they can recognize themselves on video, and there’s so much they can do that’s remarkable, and then you get into their homing abilities which are so incredible. They really are not slouches. They’re just sort of a different type of mind than we have. 

I mentioned how Skinner compared elements of pigeon and human intelligence.

Yeah. He didn’t think that pigeons were especially smart. He wasn’t super complimentary about them. But he did think that they had a lot to tell us about our own minds, which I think is interesting because they do, and then they also just do things that we can’t even fathom at the same time, which I think makes them really interesting. I mean, I couldn’t find my way home across 600 miles without some sort of a GPS or a compass or something.  

One scientist even more enamored of pigeons was Charles Darwin. Rosemary had this to say about him:

Darwin was obsessed with pigeons and he loved them. His history with pigeons was that at one point he kind of wanted to look more closely, with his evolutionary theories, at a creature that he could keep in his backyard, and pigeons were perfect because they were kind of all the rage. There was a big pigeon craze. So he built a pigeon loft. He was a little reluctant about it. He thought it wasn’t as interesting a species. So he started to go to pigeon group meetings and meet a lot of other pigeon keepers, and he just became utterly obsessed. 

I start the book with this quote from him writing to his friend [Charles] Lyell, where he says when you come visit, let me show you my pigeons, which are the greatest gift that anyone can give to someone else. Because he was just so so in love with these creatures. He would breed them, and he was trying to figure out, are all of these fancy pigeon breeds, some of which are just absolutely bizarre looking, are they all descended from the same species. And he was able to determine that yeah, they all come from Columba livia, from the Rock Dove. And so by looking at how humans changed pigeons over time, he could look at how nature might change species over time. So they were really, really instrumental, and if you read his book, there is a lot of pigeon content—so much you might get a little bogged down by all of his descriptions of all his breeds. But he was just absolutely head over heels for pigeons which I think is cool, but in a biologist’s way. He’d talk about, like, oh, they’re so beautiful and I can’t wait to skeletonize them and look at their bone formation. But yeah, he was a big pigeon fan. 

Tomorrow I’ll close out National Pigeon week with Rosemary Mosco’s and my conversation about pigeons used by various militaries to carry important messages. 

A Conversation with Rosemary Mosco Part 3

For today’s post, the third during my self-designated National Pigeon Week, celebrating Rosemary Mosco’s wonderful new book, A Pocket Guide to Pigeon Watching: Getting to Know the World’s Most Misunderstood Bird, I asked Rosemary about how pigeons are a major part of human history, going all the way back to the Neanderthals.

Yeah. The Neanderthals were eating tons and tons and tons of pigeons. 

 Explain how you know that. 

I believe they found bones of pigeons that were cut and burned. I think it was about 40,000 years ago that we know they were consuming pigeons. Although it’s hard to say exactly the relationship of humans and Neanderthals and different ancient relatives to pigeons because we're going back to a time before recorded history. Pigeons were domesticated before or around when we developed writing. And we’re missing a lot. We have to piece a lot of it together from things like bones and archeological remains and such. I really want to go back in time and watch that play out. There are so many questions that I have. 

Rosemary noted that domestication took place in the Fertile Crescent. 

When I say pigeons, I mean Rock Doves, because there are a lot of other really cool pigeon species. Like you mentioned the Dodo. But pigeons were native to parts of  Europe and parts of Asia northern Africa. We’re not totally sure because the feral ones have kind of taken over so much territory. So that was the pigeon’s native range, and that was also when agriculture was developing. And pigeons really like to eat grain. So it was sort of a no-brainer that the pigeons were hanging out and eating our grain, and we were like, “Hey, these things are tasty! Let’s put out some more grain.” And that was how the relationship kind of developed. 

I asked about other ways pigeons have been useful to people. 

This is a really interesting thing—pigeons are really really useful. I feel like it’s easy to go, oh, we domesticated the cat to keep our reflexes sharp by batting  glasses off our tables but also eat our mice, and there’s reasons we domesticated the dog or the horse, but pigeons, because we don’t use them for a lot of those purposes anymore it’s hard to remember, although they’re still used for food in a lot of the world. If you go to Egypt, you’ll eat a really fancy dish that’s made of pigeon, and there’s places in France where you’ll get fancy squab. So we were eating them. And like I said, we were using them for poop. Lots of areas in the Middle East where the soil was not necessarily the most fertile, they would put pigeon poop all over the place and they would use them for that. And then we started using them for all sorts of really interesting things like racing them, and for companionship. And there are pigeon shows like a dog show where you show off a fancy breed, and even more just like esoteric uses like in parts of Asia you’ll strap what’s called a pigeon whistle onto a pigeon. And when they fly they’ll make a beautiful sound. And these whistles have to be incredibly light so the pigeons can fly. So there are also art and music. So anything you can think of, really, we’ve put pigeons to that use. 

I asked Rosemary to talk about Reuters. 

Reuter—the original Reuter—was a fellow who made his name on the backs of pigeons essentially. The telegraph was being rolled out at the time and was revolutionizing communication, but you had to put in these cables. So there were definitely places where the lines hadn’t reached yet. Reuter made all his money by identifying this one particular spot where there weren’t lines passing through, where he could fill this gap in news by passing pigeons back and forth. The gap only stayed open for a couple of years, but he really made his name and a whole bunch of money during this period of passing pigeons back and forth. 

In the book, Rosemary called that the start of the “pigeonternet,” a pun I badly wish I’d come up with. Rosemary and I also talked about some fascinating elements of pigeon biology, which you will read tomorrow.  

You can listen to this part of our conversation here

A Conversation with Rosemary Mosco, Part 2

Yesterday, I aired part of my conversation with Rosemary Mosco, author of the brand new, charming book, A Pocket Guide to Pigeon Watching: Getting to Know the World’s Most Misunderstood Bird, about why she likes pigeons so much, and why she thinks people should watch them. Today, on Day 2 of my own personally designated National Pigeon Awareness Week, Rosemary explains why pigeons are doves.  

So, pigeons and doves belong to a scientific family called Columbidae that has just a whole bunch of different species that generally don’t interbreed a whole lot. We label them pigeons and doves sort of at random, not necessarily two separately related groups, which is why I say that pigeons are doves, absolutely, and if you venerate doves, you have to like your pigeons, too. Whereas breeds are basically varieties that we’ve developed, like bloodlines that we’ve developed in one particular species, so that they can interbreed and they all belong to the species Columba livia, which is the Rock Dove or Rock Pigeon. So it’s sort of like when you think about a dog—it comes in a chihuahua or a great dane, but a dog is technically part of the wolf species and is not the same as a fox or another dog species.

Rosemary made a few other equivalences in the book. I asked her to explain why she says pigeons are dinosaurs. 

Yes! Yes! This is so great to me! So all birds technically are dinosaurs. They evolved from dinosaurs and they’re encompassed by this scientific group of dinosaurs. There were some tiny little dinosaurs but we always think of a T. Rex or something. It’s funny for me to think about that and then think about the fact that we’ve got these tiny little T. Rexes stomping around in our streets. The dinosaurs didn’t really go extinct. It’s just that most of them did, and the birds managed to hang on and then diversified into all these different creatures. I think doves and pigeons showed up around the Jurassic time, so they’ve been around for a while, but they’re definitely dinosaurs. 

So they were probably flying over Tyrannosaurus rex who couldn’t do a thing about it with his teenie tiny arms.

And they’re cooing away and Tyrannosaurus rex is like “Stop!” 

 

The other equivalence Rosemary makes is that “pigeons are puppies.” 

Absolutely. The story about pigeon domestication is so much like the story of dog domestication. In both cases, the animal—the dog or the pigeon—was just sort of hanging around human settlements. And then there was this interrelationship that happened where we both benefited by getting kind of closer. In the case of pigeons, we benefited by eating them, we used their poop for fertilizer, and we also noticed the pretty ones and we started breeding fancy breeds. 

That domestication happened a long time ago. We don’t really know where or when. We have kind of a rough idea—we think it was in the Fertile Crescent for pigeons, but there probably wasn’t one moment where a pigeon and a human locked eyes. I like to think it went that way but it’s definitely not how it happened. And then we’ve been living together and moving both dogs and pigeons around the world as people from that particular region have travelled. And then dogs went feral, but when we see a stray dog, we think, “there’s a dog,” but when we see a stray pigeon, we think, “Oh, that’s just a bird that lives in this particular area." In a lot of cases they really don’t. So I think it’s interesting. Pigeons have a lot to tell us about human history and the way we interact with animals for sure. 

And speaking of human history, tomorrow Rosemary Mosco tells us how important pigeons are in the histories of many cultures throughout the world. Her new book, A Pocket Guide to Pigeon Watching: Getting to Know the World’s Most Misunderstood Bird, published by Workman, is available wherever books are sold. You can listen to this conversation on Laura's podcast here.

A Conversation with Rosemary Mosco: Part 1

 

Today is the first day of National Pigeon Awareness Week. It’s not an official designation except in my world, but it’s timely—pigeons saved the lives of countless American soldiers in WWI and WWII as part of the Army Signal Corps Pigeon Company, and as the only avian species to produce actual veterans, they deserve to be celebrated around Veterans Day. 

Even more important, an extraordinary book about pigeons, written and illustrated by naturalist and science writer Rosemary Mosco, has just been published. Mosco is the creator of the wildly fun and smart Bird and Moon cartoon series, and her unique and whimsical style and engaging sense of humor shine through this new book, A Pocket Guide to Pigeon Watching: Getting to Know the World’s Most Misunderstood Bird.   

Our familiar Rock Pigeon isn’t native to America but was brought here by some of the first European settlers and quickly became firmly established in towns, cities, and farms. The House Sparrow and pigeon were the first two bird species I learned in my Chicago neighborhood as a very small child. I loved watching how pigeons walk, stretching their necks so their eyes and ears can check out a scene before the rest of the body takes the risk and catches up. I loved listening to their powerful wings clapping on takeoff. And I loved how they flew high in the sky, holding their wings in a deep V as they drew my eyes to heaven, where I knew my grandmother was.  

Because I love them, I’ve read a lot about the world’s pigeons and doves. But last summer I rolled my eyes a bit when I opened an email asking me to review A Pocket Guide to Pigeon Watching, at least for the split second before I saw Rosemary Mosco’s name. That intrigued me, so I said I was interested in seeing the book. I expected it to be lighthearted and fun like Mosco’s other work. But I didn’t expect the book to be thorough and meaty as well—the perfect package. Rosemary and I met a couple of years ago when we were both speakers at a birding festival sponsored by Maine Audubon and LL Bean. I sat in on a workshop she did with families, and I was as charmed by her warmth and accessibility as I was wowed by the substance of her presentation.  

Rosemary Mosco
Photo by Adrianne Mathiowetz

I decided to talk to Rosemary about this new book about pigeons. Our conversation took place over the summer, but I’m slowing down in my dotage, so it’s taken till now for me to finally put these programs together.  I asked Rosemary why she thinks people should watch pigeons.   

I think one of the big reasons that people should watch pigeons is that they’re all over the place, which sounds like a no brainer, but there are so many really interesting birds that only cross our paths for brief times of the year or if we go to a certain really unusual location, which I have definitely done. You know people will drive hundreds of miles to see a particular bird. But pigeons are right here. And so you can practice a lot of your observational skills with pigeons, and they reward you because they are so interesting to watch. So I guess that’s reason #2, that they’re really, really interesting. Their behavior is really strange and really really amusing. I mean they kiss, they make that clapping sound, either to warn other pigeons that there’s danger or somebody else will do it as a post-copulatory display for reasons we don’t really understand.  

They’re also safe to watch. I’ve gone looking for creatures in swamps a lot and gotten all sorts of pests. With pigeons, you just walk down the street and get to watch them. These are probably my top reasons for watching pigeons.  

I particularly love Rosemary’s final reason for watching pigeons: “It’s a hard world. Sometimes you just need to look at a soft bird.”  

Right. Sometimes we just need to look at a soft bird. Yeah.   

Sesame Street really knew what it was doing. There’s Bert and Ernie, these two guys who live in a basement apartment on Sesame Street, and Bert loves pigeons. Really unquestioningly loves them. And I feel like Sesame Street was doing that because a lot of kids live in cities, and so were learning an appreciation for the nature around them. I think that was my first exposure to a positive impression of pigeons of which there are not a lot.   

I asked Rosemary what made her fall in love with pigeons in the first place.   

It’s so hard to say because I’ve liked them forever. I think it’s because I grew up in cities and my dad grew up super poor in a tenement on the lower east side of Manhattan and he tells us all sorts of stories from that time. But one thing he told me is that he knew two kinds of birds. There were the little brown ones, which I’m sure you can guess were House Sparrows, and there were the big gray ones, and those were the pigeons. And so even then he was noticing these birds that were in close proximity to him so I think they’ve just always been around and if you just start paying attention to them you can’t help but fall in love with all of their amazing behaviors and patterns.   

This blog post is a transcript of today's podcast, which you can listen to here.  Rosemary Mosco's newly released A Pocket Guide to Pigeon Watching: Getting to Know the World’s Most Misunderstood Bird is simply wonderful: the publisher's blurb is spot on saying it's "part field guide, part history, part ornithology primer, and altogether fun." For tomorrow's blog, Rosemary Mosco will explain why pigeons are doves, why they’re dinosaurs, and why they’re puppies. Yep, according to Rosemary Mosco, pigeons are puppies.