Secretly Incredibly Fascinating - Pigeons

Episode Date: May 24, 2021

Alex Schmidt is joined by comedy writer/podcaster Katie Goldin (‘Creature Feature’ podcast, @ProBirdRights) for a look at why pigeons are secretly incredibly fascinating. Visit http://sifpod.fun/ for research sources, handy links, and this week's bonus episode.

Hey folks, this is episode number 44 of Secretly Incredibly Fascinating. 4-4. I'm running a membership drive in the run-up to episode 50, which is around the corner. And as part of that drive, I want to ask you about tipping. I think tipping is a pretty American thing, but I think other countries do it too. And I think it's very common to say, thanks for being friendly to me. Thanks for providing me this coffee. Thank you for playing the guitar on the street. There's a million cases of doing it. If you're willing to become a backer of SifPod, a supporter of the show, a part of this membership drive, the cost for that is five US dollars per month. And the thing about five US dollars per month is if you

spread that out over, you know, a weekly show, that's about $1 per episode. And if you've heard the show, I hope you know that these episodes are heavily researched. They are tightly edited. I am working full time and around the clock to give you the kind of podcast you deserve to hear. And I hope you feel like that kind of podcast is worth tipping a dollar. Please head to sifpod.fun if you're willing and able to do that. And in the meantime, this new podcast episode has your name written on it. On the little coffee cup sleeve, I guess. It's an okay metaphor. Enjoy. Pigeons. Known for being birds. Famous for being grayish. being birds. Famous for being grayish. Nobody thinks much about them, so let's have some fun. Let's find out why pigeons are secretly incredibly fascinating. Hey there, folks. Welcome to a whole new podcast episode.

A podcast all about why being alive is more interesting than people think it is. My name is Alex Schmidt, and I'm not alone. Katie Golden is doing me a big old favor. She was on this podcast just three episodes ago to talk about vanilla. She's stepping right back into guesting because the two of us doing this topic can make you an episode of Secretly Incredibly Fascinating that is unlike any other. This is special for a couple reasons. First of all, you, the listeners, chose the topic. Great job. Great thinking. Thank you to Pat Dalton for suggesting it. Also, thank you to Keaton Ellis

for seconding it in the thread. I love the support that I see in those Democracy threads. It's really cool. And then, if you're a fan of this show, you know Katie Golden. You know how awesome she is. I hope you also know she hosts the best podcast about animals. It's called Creature Feature. It's over on iHeartRadio. Please hurry up and hear it. Also, Katie Golden writes, I think, the funniest comedy from the perspective of a bird. It's her incredible at ProBirdWrites Twitter account that we will talk about. So I'm thrilled Katie came right back for a made-to-order episode.

Also, I've gathered all of our zip codes and used internet resources like native-land.ca to acknowledge that I recorded this on the traditional land of the Catawba, Eno, and Shikori peoples. Acknowledge Katie recorded this on the traditional land of the Gabrielino-Ortongva and Keech and Chumash peoples. And acknowledge that in all of our locations, native people are very much still here. That feels worth doing on each episode. And today's episode, once again, it is about pigeons. Let's get into it.

Please sit back or bob your head forward and backward as you walk. I'm into it. That's cool, man. Either way, here's this episode of Secretly Incredibly Fascinating with the one and only Katie Golden. I'll be back after we wrap up. Talk to you then. Katie Golden, thank you so much for coming right on back

for maybe the ideal Katie Golden episode of the show. Pigeons! I always start by asking people their relationship or opinion to the topic, but you have so many for pigeons. Pigeons! Pigeons! Yeah, I love all birds. I always have. When I was a little kid, my mom said that I used to run around the backyard and my mom asked me what I was doing.

And I was like saying, trying to catch a bird. And my mom wanted to know why. And I said, I think if it got to know me, we would be friends. So that's been my general attitude towards birds ever since. Like, I think if they got to know me, we would be friends. ever since. Like, I think if they got to know me, we would be friends. Love birds. Love every kind of bird, even the weird ones, like pigeons. Were there pigeons around where you grew up? I think when I was a kid in the suburbs of Chicago, I just assumed they only lived in New York City. And then I visited actual Chicago and saw a few, but I don't know if you had any there in Southern California. Yeah, not so much. There weren't really that many in San Diego. I remember

when we went on a family trip to San Francisco, there were a lot of pigeons and I was so excited lot of pigeons and I was so excited and I got some crackers and started feeding the pigeons. And before I knew it, I was covered in pigeons and I was not expecting them because I was used to birds being very hesitant and very shy. And so I was like, well, this is fine. I'll offer them a cracker and lure them to be my friend. I didn't understand the psychology of pigeons, which is they're not shy at all. And they will, as soon as you offer them food, it's just kind of a conquest situation. So before I knew it, like little like nine-year-old me

was just covered in pigeons, like scrabbling, trying to get at the crackers. And I can't say I was scared, though. I think I was thrilled to be the center of so much pigeon attention. They were like on your body. Like maybe there's more bread here. Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Like I had my little crackers in my hands. They're like on my arms, on my hands, you know, at my feet. You know, it was just amazing. And my my mom was like maybe don't do that she wasn't super happy about it because to see your little your little mind you're like look mom and you're just like all these like little street birds that's not the sound they make but you know to a mother it's probably like in my in my mind here i am a little disney princess like la la la la with all these beautiful forest animals and then then through my mom's eyes it's like her little daughter covered in like flying rats like screeching and clawing at her yeah so i hadn't even thought about that. Isn't it Snow White is the most famous one where a blue bird just lands on her finger and then sets unrealistic expectations for all children that birds will just light upon you and bless you.

Yeah. Yeah. No, that's what I had always expected as a child. And it never happened until I met the noble pigeon. it never happened until i met the noble pigeon i love that your mom has been skeptical of your quest to touch birds throughout your life well i wouldn't say that she's been she was charmed by it uh and like like would always get me like bird thing like bird toys as a kid like a little stuffed bird she got me a little a cute little like sculpture like mini thing, like bird toys as a kid, like little stuffed birds. She got me a little, a cute little like sculpture,

like mini statue of like a little girl holding a bird. Cause she's like, see, this is you and you're holding a bird. So she's very encouraging of it. I think it was just, it was specifically me being covered in frantic pigeons. That was maybe a little concerning for her.

Cause she's thinking, well, these, you know, pigeons are trying to claw the flesh from my daughter. Maybe that's not good. But no, and otherwise, she's been highly encouraging of my bird friendships. That's very sweet, actually. I love that. Now I'm wondering, I'm sure there's not a statistic for this i'm wondering like in in human bird history it i feel like people have either had no birds land on them or a swarm right there's probably very few situations where it's just one like snow white and really chill like it's either oh none of them are doing anything

or all of the buzzards anything right or all of the buzzards it's just all of the pigeons whatever it is well it's interesting because yeah like when I was a little kid I was desperate desperate to like catch a bird so I could hold it I would even do the wily coyote thing I got a cardboard box and put a stick on it and I'll tie the string to the stick and put some bird seed under the box. Yeah, no, literally. This sounds like a bit, but this is what I did as a kid. And I set up the box and put the bird seed under the box and with a little stick and string. So you pull the string and the stick comes out from under the box and closes like Wile E. Coyote. Because that's where I learned it from cartoons and it never worked ever, but Wile E. Coyote, because that's where I probably learned it from cartoons.

And it never worked, ever. But I still tried. But as an adult, what's so funny is that I have had many weird bird encounters as an adult. Like as a child, when I try really hard, I, of course, never was able to find or catch a bird. But now as an adult, I've encountered multiple weird bird things. One time, a dead quail slammed into my window. And I was like, well, that's a bit strange. And I went outside and kind of just like, you know, looked at this dead, dead quail. And I

kind of thought that maybe it flown into the window so hard it died but then this hawk landed on the fence next to me and was just like staring at me and looking between me and the quail and it's like suddenly all became clear that this quail belonged to the hawk like it had caught this probably dropped it on accident

and it slammed in my window and it just kept like looking between me and the quail like you're not going to eat that are you because uh i you know i was gonna and so i just slowly backed away and the hawk was like looking at me and was like all right cool and then grabbed the quail and flew away and i've like encountered multiple fledglings and nestlings like so fledglings are little birds that are about to be able to fly but they usually wander away from their nest okay and when I first found one I was worried because I thought it was a nestling like a baby bird that had fallen

out of its nest and it needed help but in fact it was they do fly away from their nests, they are trying to like practice flying and stuff. So if you see a bird who's like, got its feathers, it's like little maybe it's still got a little bit of downiness, but its eyes are open. It's got all of its feathers. It seems like maybe it can't quite fly yet. That's probably a fledgling. and it's probably practicing flying and trying to figure things out so it's probably okay and you don't need to put it back in the nest but if it's like eyes are closed and it's like not got that many feathers then you should i actually just found i'm sorry i keep telling bird stories but i just found a you have bird stories? What? I didn't anticipate that. Oh, it's off the rails now.

I just found a nest of, I believe these are, I believe these are phoebes. And they. A phoebe. A phoebe, yeah. I think they're called black-headed phoebes to me. Cool. I didn't know there's a bird called a phoebe. That's new to me completely.

Oh, just, yeah, just black, or either black-headed Phoebes or black Phoebes. And they are in the parking, like in my apartment's parking garage, just in the rafters of an unused parking spot. And I have been just like kind of observing them for the past week or so, because it's just this little nest chock full of baby birds it's like they're just jammed in there uh like there's one and then like a butt sticking out and a head and

like a wing and they're too many i think for this nest and they're all crammed in there and then the other day i was checking in on them and one of them like had like partially fallen out and was like hanging on to the nest by its leg but kind of doing the splits so it's like one leg was clinging onto the next and the other one leg was clinging onto the nest and the other was like dangling out and it uh did not look very happy about it so i just very gently like nudged it back in the nest and the the mama bird was like mad at me and like like you know peeping at me because she was worried that i was like touching the nest but it's like i'm just pushing baby back into the nest um so i'll check on them again today make sure because

that's amazing because their eyes are open now and they look like they're about ready to leave which i'm excited about i like i'm imagining them it's like when the seven dwarves are all sleeping in one bed but like a lag hands out and you just put it back in yeah really a lot of snow white touch sounds here going great yeah well and uh and of course i i hope people know at pro bird rights your great twitter account yeah i i've sort sort of assumed that character is a few different bird or birb species. We'll also link about Katie coining the word birb. But I feel like pigeons are maybe in the general vein of that personality, right? Like it's sort of that style.

Yeah. Technically, the bird, not a character, but a real bird who talks to me of that Twitter account is a European robin. Yeah. But I would say that the the thoughts of the bird can definitely apply to many bird species. That is like an obsession with crumbs and your food and corn. with crumbs and your food and corn. And yeah, a lot of the thoughts on the Pro Bird Rights Network channel worldwide could be applied to pigeons, I think, for sure.

I'm so thrilled to do all this pigeon stuff with you. And we can get into our first chunk of it because on every episode, our first fascinating thing about the topic is a quick set of fascinating numbers and statistics. And that's in a segment called Sweet Stats on the CivPod, where the numbers are all true. Sweet Stats on the CivPod, drop some knowledge here for you. Wow, that was beautiful.

Yeah, thank you. It was submitted by Alex Wade. Thank you, Alex. Thank you, Leonard Skinner. We have a new name for this segment every week. Please make them as silly and wacky as possible. Submit to SipPod on Twitter or to SipPod at gmail.com. Putting the nerd back into Leonard Skinner.

I have truly never thought of them that way. Really excited about it now. The first number here is a big nerdy number. Four hundred million. Wow. And 400 million is the approximate world population of pigeons. Nice. That's about how many there are. So be nice to them.

You know what I mean? They have the numbers? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. This is from National Geographic. They also say that apparently it's very hard to estimate the amount of pigeons just in New York City. So the estimates are anywhere from 1 million to 7 million,

which at that point you're just guessing, I think. But that's what they say about New York. From 1 to 7 million, that's a large error bar. Right. Yeah, like at that point, what are we estimating? What are we doing? Right, right. You could just say a lot.

Don't worry about it. There's a lot there Don't worry about it. There's a lot there. Yeah. Next number. And this was I did not know this. The next number is 15 years. And that is the potential lifespan of a pigeon in captivity. That's coming from Bloomberg. And then also BBC News says that one pigeon named Old Man in Wilshire County, England, lived past the age of 22. So that's one of the longest lives of a pigeon recorded. Wow. Yeah, that's like the Methuselah of pigeons.

Now, they must have named it Old Man after it had reached a certain milestone. Because otherwise, if you name a baby bird Old Man, and I get it because baby birds do look like old men. But that would be more of a prophecy that this bird was prophesied to become an old bird. But that's cool. Yeah, I imagine that in captivity, like with most animals, they live a lot longer than they do in the wild. Yeah. Although pigeons are such good urban adapters, maybe they do live quite long in cities. I'm not sure.

The other number here, and it probably super varies across which place they are, but the Cornell Lab of Ornithology says that a wild pigeon lives an average of 2.4 years right so a lot shorter than 15 but but also like i i feel like there's huge variance with that like if you're in a quiet part of the city you probably live a lot longer i mean that's similar actually to fox lifespans like in the wild they their average lifespan is only two years, three years. But in captivity, they can live to be about 15 years. Similar to a dog-ish. A little shorter of a lifespan than a dog, I think. Yeah.

Nature is hard. It is. Man, oh man. I don't want to do that. Forgive it. Starting to like being in a city, aren't you? Yeah. I'm going to keep taping podcasts about air conditioning in air conditioning that's what i'm gonna do it's great just double it up right next number here is 120 and 120 is how many pigeons Charles Darwin donated to the British Natural History Museum

after he did experiments on them. Thank God. I thought you might say that was how many pigeons Charles Darwin ate. Oh. Because he liked to eat a lot of weird stuff. Like he would discover an animal and then eat it. But no, that's good. Donated.

Yeah. But he I'm sure he ate a few at least. But maybe maybe he ate less because they were not exotic. Because because you're right. He was a big weird meats guy. But he was like pigeons. I've seen that. Weird meats guy.

Yeah. He he liked those turtles. Yeah. Yeah. It's got a bowl on its back. How do I not? I'm Charles Darwin. It's got a bowl on its back. How do I not? I'm Charles Darwin. It's got a built-in bowl. For goodness sakes. It's like it's asking me to eat it. It's so slow. Easy to catch.

Yeah, that's interesting. So these were like presumably stuffed taxidermied birds that he donated to the museum. Yeah, I think some were. It turns out after he was in the Galapagos Islands studying finches, when he came back to England, he said, one like follow up experiment I should do is study pigeons. And so he looked at differences between pigeons and bred pigeons. And some of his pigeons came as gifts. Some were ones he bred. But another step in writing on the origin of species

was the study of pigeon differences. It was another thing you could look at. Yeah, that's really interesting. Yeah. Yeah, because you can, pigeons do have, especially when you selectively breed pigeons, they have very interesting different morphologies. So it's like, I think people think of pigeons as strictly the city pigeon you know pink feet gray and green

bodies uh little beady eyes uh a hunger a hunger for bread um piling on a small girl yes exactly yeah yeah small girl attacking a small delighted girl. But like when you selectively breed, not only are there and I'm sure you're going to get into this, but not only are there different species of pigeon, but like when you selectively breed pigeons, you get all sorts of wonderful, different morphologies of pigeon. Yeah, I think I will not get much into like pigeon fancying or styles because part of it's visual. But yeah, that's totally a thing. And I'm glad you talked about it. I came here for pigeon fanciers and you lied to me. I do. I wonder if when British people were developing pigeon fancying, they ever stopped and said like, this sounds British even for us.

Right. Come on. This is even by British standards. Pigeon fancying they ever stopped and said like this sounds british even for us right come on this is even by british standards pigeon fancying boy oh boy well i'm chuffed about this pigeon fancying personally i'm downright chuffed about my curly pigeon with the curly feathers um yeah but i mean i guess since we're not going to talk about it, just if people don't know, like, but there are a lot of pigeon breeders and they come up with like very strange pigeons, pigeons that have like curly feathers, literally look like poodle pigeons. dusters around their feet. They have pigeons that like are very tall and stand up and have like a big kind of bulbous chest. Just all sorts of very strange, strange breeds of pigeons. So if you, if you look, do a Google image search for weird pigeon breeds, safe search on, you'll find some cool stuff. Oh, yeah, yeah. Safe for work. Like weird for work, but safe for work.

You're fine. Right, right. And I got, you know, like some of, I'm not necessarily condoning all types of like weird bird breeding. Like I think sometimes they don't take into account the comfort of the bird, and that's not good. But for other ones, like with the curly poodle feathers, I think it's probably okay.

Linda, and one last number here, and it's a slight detour, but the last number is a date. It is September 1st, 1914. And September 1st... The first pigeon was invented by John R. Pigeon. Like, Thomas Edison invents it and brutally patents it. Like, crushes anyone who tries to generate new pigeons.

Huge stance on them. Yeah. Huge stamps on them. September 1st, 1914 is the date of the death of the last North American passenger pigeon. And I want to focus on like, quote unquote, regular pigeons this show, because it turns out there's just that much stuff about them. But I don't know, passenger pigeons are amazing, too. And there used to be hundreds of millions of them in North America. Yeah. A bird named Martha died on that date at the Cincinnati Zoo and was well known to be the last one.

Yeah. It's sad. They used to be a major species of North America. There were so many. They used to black out the sky with how huge a flock uh would congregate in the air and people would see just these massive flocks and because they were so numerous people just kind of considered them pests or free meat they were hunted and there was no real thoughts to conservation of either the birds themselves or their habitat because they would

live in these uh forest areas uh with these nut nut trees one of the most popular species for de-extinction that is trying to revive the species through cloning or gene editing is the passenger pigeon because of how they did so much to help with the environment in North America. So they would kind of manage these forests. The problem with the de-extinction of the passenger pigeon is that these forests that they used to live in no longer really exist in North America because of so much development of the land. But the idea is if we kind of try to bring back some of this natural habitat and bring back the passenger pigeon, we may be able to bring back some of the original ecology of North America, which is interesting. It's a complicated, controversial issue. But yeah.

Wow. Yeah, I didn't know we're so interested in bringing them back. Because, yeah, and apparently it was very man-made destruction of them, just hunting and deforestation. I guess it would be nice if there was a man-made bounce back of some kind. Some kind of Jurassic Parking. I don't know the details. Well, just, it's, they're one of the more popular species for the extinction because of the relatively recent extinction. But what would be the repercussions of that? And with some people thinking, well, this would be a good thing for the environment as long as we pair it with forest restoration.

And some people worry that, well, but, you know, what if the ecology of the regions have changed too much and reintroducing the species would not be advisable. So, yeah, so there's like, it's a really interesting topic, though. And it's amazing to me that those were so numerous and are gone, and then now we have these regular pigeons that almost feel automatic. It's like, oh, yeah, another pigeon, of course. I'm on a city block. So that's how it works. Right. Yeah, because they were able to adapt to urban environments really well. And that's,

we get a lot of, a lot of the species we kind of take for granted of like, yeah, they're the rats of the sky, these pigeons. It's like, well, we built these cities and they have learned to adapt to it. And they're so good at adapting to an urban environment of course they're going to be everywhere and of course they're going to be in your trash but you know we kind of look down upon them for being dirty and in our trash but really that's them like triumphing over human uh intervention yeah i love that but yeah and and and they're also like making room for us and we're like bunch of jerks. Right. It's cool.

They're coexisting. Like rats and pigeons, you know, they are just taking advantage of us terraforming the earth to our human desires and I can't blame them for that. Yeah. Yeah, good for them. And everything's good. They're great. Yeah. They deserve their own podcast episode.

Squeak, squeak, squeak,ak squeak coo coo coo called squeakers and the beak that's their their drive time radio show a couple of pitches squeakers and the beak a.m in the morning sundays i like that squeakers, but the beak is too edgy for me. I don't know. They got to produce that show differently. And it's simply rat and natural pigeon noises

and like chewing. It's like, man, squeakers getting political on us. Well, those are the stats and numbers. And I'll just go ahead and say this is a pretty ambitious episode because we have potentially four takeaways. Haven't done that before. What? I know. Pigeons are that exciting.

That's why there's no more passenger pigeon stuff on the show. You wouldn't dare. And from there, we can go into takeaway number one pigeons and doves are pretty much the same thing yep i had no idea until researching this it like it turns out they're just branded very differently and there are different subspecies, but that's pretty much it. It's just like marketing for each bird is different. Yeah. Yeah. Doves are basically like, uh, I mean, there are dove species and there are pigeon species,

but they're, uh, you know, tax, taxologically just like very, basically the same family. Yeah. It turns out, uh floss interviewed paul sweet who is the collection manager for the department of ornithology at the american museum of natural history and he said both dove and pigeon refer to the 308 species of birds in the family columbidae and there is no like difference beyond that in the scientific nomenclature until you get down to nitty gritty different species. Yeah. And he said that something that's called a dove might be smaller than a pigeon or more white, but it's not always the case.

Common pigeons have been called both rock doves and rock pigeons. It's all just differences in words. He says the word dove came into the English language from Nordic languages, and the word pigeon came from French languages. You know, it's all just kind of style. Like we see a white bird that we think is angelic, and we say, that's a dove. Hey, Catholic kids, that's the Holy Spirit, you know, and then the pigeon is just on the city block. That's all it is. Yeah. You can breed and you can breed pigeons to be white. And then they look almost indistinguishable from like a white dove.

Because they're basically the same animal. I can stop painting them really messily. That's good. Saves me a lot of time. Just painting the pigeons. Just painting the pigeons. Making them pretty. Yeah.

There was, I think there was an art exhibit that, and I can't necessarily approve of it, but someone like set up a pigeon painting, an autonomous pigeon painting station where pigeons would like go through, like they'd be lured in with the promise of crackers or something. like they'd be lured in with the promise of crackers or something and then they'd like go through this like pigeon spraying thing that would spray them with like non-toxic pigeon dye and so there were these like rainbow colored pigeons and it was supposed like according to the artist it was supposed to get people to appreciate the beauty of pigeons but i don't feel like the pigeons would appreciate just like oh a cool snack ah what's oh god i'm blue now i don't want to be blue

so i don't know about i don't know about this art definitely also when people like glue hats on the pigeons that's horrible That is really bad for them. Oh, yeah. In general, don't put a thing on a pigeon. You know what I mean? Leave them alone. Let them be naked and free. And I'm guessing you found out about that art installation through the Internet.

And then I know about hats on pigeons through the Internet. There's also apparently in March of 2021, there was a tweet that went viral about a so-called hot pigeon, which is just a breed that's called the pink-necked green pigeon. It's just a pretty colorful pigeon. The internet should maybe ease up on decorating pigeons. They already look cool.

Just appreciate them. It's fine. We'll have a picture linked of the pink-necked green pigeon. It's what you think. It's what I just described, and it looks cool. That's an actual species of pigeon, though, right? A naturally occurring species, right? Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah, those are beautiful. Yeah, isn't that from Southeast Asia, right? The green pigeon? Oh, yeah. Yeah, you're right. Yeah, this says, I just pulled up the source again. It's confined to parts of Thailand and Vietnam, and it's also native to other countries around there.

It's a Southeast Asian pretty pigeon. That's all it is. Yeah, they're beautiful. But that's their, like, they look like Sherbert. Sherbert colors. But that's's like they're naturally occurring colors. Yeah. Beautiful plumage. It's a Monty Python joke.

Because we're in high school, and remember in high school when all you would do all day is do Monty Python bits and like like the the dead bird bit and it's like beautiful plumage anyways i'm sorry i apologize oh i that that brought me straight back to for some reason math class i i there's something about being in like honors math in high school means you love monty python it It's some kind of connection. And it's probably just an American thing. It's probably more general in Britain. But yeah, I don't know, because that's exactly right. I think it was a thing of like, in high school, you find this like weird, wacky British comedy, you're like, I'm really unique for liking Monty Python. I'm very

smart, because it's British. And so, you know, all of the quote unquote smart nerdy kids, myself included, would be like, oh, we're going to quote Monty Python for that is the pinnacle of comedy. Did you see the comedy skit in which a shop owner tries to sell a dead bird? It's funny. And then other kids are like, Seinfeld was really good. And it's like, with American accents, those Neanderthals, get out of here. Seinfeld is the peasants video program. Yeah. But yeah, and these like hot pigeons, too, I feel like they're a good example of how we kind of only have two conceptions of pigeons, either the gray pigeon kind and the white dove kind.

And so then the Internet lost its mind when there was a third kind, even though there are hundreds of kinds. Yeah. And they're all the same thing. So many. Yeah. So many flavors of pigeon. All right. Off of that, we're going to a short break, followed by the big takeaways.

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the halls. Well, from here, we can get into takeaway number two of Potential Four. Takeaway number two. Wild city pigeons are the descendants of domesticated pigeons, which are the descendants of wild rock pigeons. And that might be a little bit confusing. But so when we have like city pigeons running around that are wild, they're descended from domesticated pigeons that people owned. And those are the descendants of wild pigeons that lived on the land. That's the progression. wild pigeons that lived on the land. That's the progression.

That's so interesting. Because I think I knew that they were related to rock pigeons, but I didn't know there was that intermediary we owned them for a while until they turned against us and freed themselves and now own us. That's right.

The last step is they are the president. Oh, it's through the Twitter account. It's all coming together. Oh, no. Katie is an agent of the pigeons. It's happening. Just accept it. Yeah, too late, so the start of it is wild pigeons. And Katie was talking before and was dead on about pigeons adapted themselves to our towers and other city buildings. It's because the original wild pigeons especially like to live in cliffs and other high nesting sites like that. In cities, they just substitute eaves and ledges and other stuff that's like that. So they like high places, and they eventually just did that in cities. But the first wild pigeons were wild rock pigeons. They just found cool rocky areas and did that. Yeah, and if you look at a rock

pigeon, it looks very much exactly like a city pigeon. Or they can also be called rock doves, like we said earlier. And it's just like, oh, yeah, that's like, isn't that just like a city pigeon? Yeah. At one point, though, they were kept as pets. Yeah. And then it turns out there are like thousands of years of domestication of pigeons as pets and as livestock. According to Encyclopedia Britannica, there's art as old as 4,500 BC from ancient Mesopotamia depicting domestic pigeons in mosaics and figurines and coins. So going back like 6,500

years at least, people have been domesticating pigeons, you know, kind of like chickens or turkeys or something like that. And the Cornell Lab of Ornithology says, quote, the birds have such a long history with humans, it's impossible to tell where the species' original range was, end quote. So they kind of co-evolved with us. Yeah. Similar to the way, like, dogs co-evolvedved with us where it's just like such a long history of them being in and among humans uh that it's like hard to know where exactly it started yeah that's right like we we're pretty sure they did something before us and then now they now they're our buddies

right and uh and also there's a journalist named niel Johnson who wrote a book called Unseen City about urban wildlife. And he said that this first domestication was in the Middle East and then it spread to Europe thanks to the Romans. And it was also primarily an aristocratic thing. Like if a traditional Roman villa in Tuscany in Italy would have a building that was both a lookout tower and a pigeon house. Like it's high up for both of those purposes. I guess I did know about like keeping pigeons as pets because first of all, I learned it from Hey Arnold, the cartoon where there's the remember in Hey Arnold, there was character like Pigeon Man who had a bunch of pigeons and then he would have them help him fly

he had like a special suit this was a children's cartoon so this isn't real don't don't try it but yeah and and so like i've seen i've seen that a lot in like you know people keeping um just like a little pigeon thing is like but typically it'd be like in new york or something uh where it's like they have like on the roof of their building, they have like a little pigeon coop and just like let their pigeons fly around and then they'll return to the coop. It is a thing into the modern day that people have like a loft or a coop or something for pigeons on purpose. And in Hey Arnold, it's kind of a sad, weird guy, but it's also other people. And that was a dark cartoon. It was really, really hard to see Pigeon Man like that.

Yeah, because he was like covered in bird dookie too. It is weird. I don't know. Linda, and then the pigeons were both eaten as poultry and also kept as pets, and especially as pets by aristocratic people. And then the progression from there is around the 1600s, and this is according to the New York Public Library, around the 1600s, Europeans then brought pigeons into the US and also what was British Canada to raise them as food or as a hobby. They were also given

as gifts when governors and dignitaries met each other. So there was a lot of transmission of pigeons, you know, across the Atlantic Ocean that way. Sounds like a disease a country catches, like transmission of pigeons. No, I don't mean it. Pigeons are great. But that's interesting. So the pigeons we have in North America, like in our cities, are introduced. They're a quote unquote invasive species, right?

Yeah, apparently they're domesticated rock pigeons from the quote unquote old world, especially Europe, that were then brought to North America by colonists. Interesting, yeah. North America by colonists. Interesting. Yeah. And then from there, the people who owned domesticated pigeons in North America, some of them escaped or got away or were just let go. And then those rewilded and became feral and became the city pigeon population we have now. Yeah. That's actually how we got starlings too. Someone came here with some pet starlings and they escaped and now they're an invasive species. That's really cool. And honeybees are not indigenous to North America, but we do have wild bees. I wouldn't say that the honeybees are, I don't think that they're destroying the native bees,

but I think there's a lot of of like when honeybee populations start to struggle there's like a lot of concern about the honeybees but then like native bee populations sometimes have struggles and like there's just not as much like media concern about like disappearance of native bee populations which i think is a shame because like they're very important to our environment. Yeah. Yeah. Well, and I remember learning a lot about bees from you with the murder hornets.

Yeah. Your show creature feature, which is great. I want to plug all the time. But because, yeah, it turns out there are all these different insect species, different places. And as people, we super don't think about which one belongs where. They're so small. Right. You know, they're all bees.

Surely they're the same. I said like a dumb American. And so these rewilded now city pigeons, apparently they're an especially tough and successful form of pigeon. They're also very good at living where no other bird wants to live in a city. And so they spread worldwide like they became the city pigeons everywhere except Antarctica and then also that process according to Nathaniel Johnson meant that pigeon domestication kind of fell off because before that it was mostly fancy people mostly doing something like stylish and fancy

and then once pigeons are everywhere underfoot you you're like, oh, well, that's not cool anymore. It's not cool anymore, yeah. Like I don't have a pet rat either. Forget it. Yeah. I mean, like I think people are surprised when people keep pigeons as pets because a lot of people see city pigeons as kind of like vermin. Like, oh, why would you?

I mean, it's the same kind of surprise of people maybe keeping rats as pets, which people do. Which is a thing, yeah. Yeah, and apparently they're good pets if you know how to take care of them. They're very intelligent. And I imagine pigeons are similar. Like, they're probably pretty intelligent. But, yeah, I mean, like, it is interesting. And then like I remember back before I knew too many bird facts, I was so surprised to find. I think this was when I was in Boston and there were pigeons that were like different colors from what you would expect.

So like brown and brown and white pigeons or like with spots like a dog. And I was like, oh, what? Like, what is this? And that's sort of a sign of domestication is there these like splotchy colorations of these pigeons. Oh, that would make sense because they keep breeding them the same way or keep going for a particular thing. Yeah, I know with and I'm not sure if it works the same thing with birds because birds are, you know, very different from mammals. But I know with with dogs and pigs and cats and cows, et cetera, like when you domesticate an animal because of the way that their their early development in terms of like their their neural crest cells developing in utero actually are also related to things like their pigment coloration, even things like ear cartilage.

So like when you domesticated a dog or a fox or a cow or a pig, you'll get things like floppy ears and spotty patches on their skin, like a dog with spots. There's an experiment in Russia where they would domesticate these foxes and their ears would flop down and they would get like these patches of coloration on their skin. And I don't really know because birds are, they're dinosaurs. They're not mammals so presumably their fetal development is really different from like a from a any kind of mammal but i do wonder if whether it was intentional like breeding for different colorations or if some of it was just

unintentional like when you breed them, you domesticate them for being more gentle or something or less afraid of humans, if that just naturally pops up. Sadly, this is a good time to get into takeaway number three for the show. Takeaway number three. Pigeons are not mammals, but all genders of pigeon can generate a secret throat version of milk. Yes. And this is called crop milk. One more time, that's pigeons are not mammals, but all of them can generate a secret version of milk in their throat. That's called crop milk.

It's kind of gross. Yeah, and I want to do some gross pigeon stuff. Like, I feel like, but I feel like the rap of pigeons is they're very blandly gross, right? Like, they're not, they're not disgusting. They're just kind of dirty on the ground there. Yeah. I want to get into ways they're amazing and like the real gross thing, you know? Yeah.

Let's really do it. The body horror stuff. Yeah, yeah. Let's really do it. The body horror stuff. Yeah, yeah. And one source for this, one of them is the book The Urban Bestiary by Leanda Lynn Haupt, but another is a show from Audubon.

It's called Bird Note, and they did an amazing episode about this. The crop is a section of a pigeon's anatomy. It's part of the lower esophagus of pigeons and some other birds. So it's inside their throat, down in the esophagus. And after a few weeks of being alive, a baby pigeon can start to eat mashed up seeds. But before that, they need crop milk. It is not mammal milk, but it is a thick, soupy mixture that is produced inside the crop of the pigeon. I'm sorry, but just calling it thick, soupy mixture gave me a wave of nausea.

Oh, really? Oh, yeah. This is the test to see whether you're a pigeon. If you were a pigeon, you'd be like, sounds great, really good. Yum, I'd start drooling. Sorry, continue. Yeah, so there's's this thick soupy mixture being generated by a thing inside

of the throat of an adult pigeon and then what happens is the baby sticks their head all the way into the adult's throat to slurp out the crop milk from like inside of their throat it's amazing it's really cool so weird yeah yeah it's interesting yeah bird digestion is is very interesting a lot of birds have the crop where they uh do kind of like it's sort of like with you know how like cows have different stomachs for digestion uh birds yeah they have the crop where they do pre-digestion or post-digestion kind of like weirdness one bird i think called the watson uh not like the famous sherlock holmes character but like uh with some like an h and a z in it and it um is one of the like oldest species of birds in the world and

it like i think it's one of the only species that like does like a type of like um fermentation in their crop and so they smell really bad uh because like it's they're basically like fermenting stuff in their crop uh and like vegetation i think and so okay beer basically great really good right yeah bird beer uh but it's real stinky um and so it's really interesting because that's like a very, very ancient species of bird, very early bird 1.0. So it seems like bird 10X, the pigeon, has potentially refined some of the processes with processing things in the crop. Yeah, it's a 10X bird. It could do 10 times the engineering and coding of a regular bird i don't know uh yeah yeah i'm not not necessarily suggesting that the watson is like an ancestor

of like modern birds it's just like an early it's sort of like how the platypus and other monotremes are like super early versions of like mammals or it's like mammals 1.0 with a bunch of like weird bugs like the legs and stuff. Or even like sharks are so old. I feel like every like sharks were designed when it was like all an animal can do is be angry and eat all of the time. Yeah. And then later we came up with other kinds of animals that don't have to do that.

It's like, see, teeth and cannot stop moving. Yeah. That's good. I'm sorry. Only some sharks are obligate ram ventilators. I apologize. I love that you know enough to qualify it like that. That's just amazing.

Really good. I love that you know enough to qualify it like that. That's just amazing. Really good. I'm just being as insufferable as I can on your podcast. It's the best. Have you ever heard of the comedy troupe Monty Python? Man, a parrot episode.

We'll come right back. Same thing's gonna be great like speaking of the evolution and nathaniel johnson in his book he talks about the basic idea that this is not mammal milk it is a different thing but it evolved to be a similar thing just on a completely different path so these birds and including the watson with the weird fermented one, they just figured out like what milk is supposed to do. And it has a bunch of antioxidants and antibodies and stuff. But it's not the mammal way. It's just this other branch of life. Yeah, it's a convergent evolution. Oh, right. Yeah, that's, yeah, that's the name. Yeah, that's great.

Bird brand milk. Yeah. And then the other amazing thing to me about it is that, and this is Liana Lynn Hopp's book, she says that a couple days before a pigeon's eggs hatch, both parents start making this substance because they both have crops and it evolved differently from mammals. And so, like, I have not been able to find anything about other genders of pigeon, but male and female pigeons can both generate this. They can just do it. That's great.

I love some gender equity in birds. Yeah, there are so many examples of how with birds, parental care is often very, if not very equal, they at least both put a lot of effort into it in different ways and it's it's really cool that's nice it's always interesting to look at young young rearing in other animals and how it's like this idea that like well the mommy takes care of the babies is like such a like when you look at all of nature uh it's just like no that's not not necessarily true always like it's yeah like uh i mean it makes sense too right like if you create babies you do want those babies to survive and pass on your genes um is a typically good strategy for evolution. So, yeah, for a lot of birds have very equitable parental care.

It's really cool. Yeah, it's just cool that everybody's petronine. I love it. We should have more paternity leave so that men can go and vomit up milk onto their babies. And so they don't have to like pump their crop in the work bathroom and stuff. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Oh, man. Society would be so different if men had to like go through the same things that women had to go through. Like, I feel like a pigeon, a super intelligent pigeon society would probably have a lot of issues of sexism solved just because of that crop milk. It feels like it. Yeah, it makes sense to me. Okay, so gross question, Alex. Has any human ever tried crop milk before?

Oh, great question. I have no idea. I don't think't think so it seems hard it seems hard to get you know why would you okay i'm gonna google it though has that's worth googling it anyone ever tried to drink pigeon crop milk safe search on uh gizmodo claims someday soon you could be drinking pigeon milk no thank you gizmodo shut up hmm sounds like sounds clicky i don't like yeah i don't like it uh okay no this is clickbait clickbait because um it just seems so hard to get you know it's it's like like it's a big organ if you're a baby pigeon, but it's a very small organ of substance for the rest of us. I don't know if it's that hard to get. You take a pigeon, you take a lactating pigeon.

I know it's not called lactation, but you take a pigeon. You turn it upside down and you like, you know, squeeze it like a thing of ketchup. I'm kidding. Don't do that. Yeah. You tap the 57 on the pigeon. You just like kind of tap its rump

for the crop milk to come out. Well, if anyone's ever tried to drink crop milk, why don't you write into Alex and give him a full rundown of the flavor. Sippodigybill.com, really want to know. I'm making myself feel nauseous.

Well, I to move you past your nausea Katie, this is a very exciting, momentous thing, because we're about to go into takeaway number four. What? Takeaway number four. We are still figuring out how homing pigeons do it. It's amazing how pigeons can home and return to a location. We're still figuring out how theying pigeons do it. It's amazing how pigeons can home and return to a location. We're still figuring out how they do it. Mystery. It's thrilling. And there's a bunch of sources for this. One of them is a book by BBC journalist Gordon Carrera about pigeons in World

War Two, actually. Right. But he says that a pigeon can start to learn to home when it's six weeks old. You establish a location as a safe place to sleep and to eat. And then whenever you bring them a new place, they'll come back. They just know how to find it again. Right. Yeah. So it's really cool. Lots of people have trained pigeons to do this. And then pigeons have been recorded to fly hundreds of miles to get back to their place. It's an amazing ability they have. And it's also an ancient practice that we'll talk more about in the bonus, that people can train pigeons to go places and come back to places.

Right. Yeah. So what you do like for a carrier pigeon or a homing pigeon is like you, you take the pigeon like in, I don't know, carrying thing with you. And then if you have to write a message back to where it came from you write the little note you attach it to a little canister on that attaches to the pigeon and you release it and then it flies home it doesn't know they don't really know like how to go like okay agent pigeon like you have to go to the battle of the bulge and like go to the front and, you know, like the pigeon doesn't, they just are trying to get home. So like you, you take the pigeon away from where it's been trained as its home, tie the message to it. And when you release it, it will go home. And so if you train the pigeon, then it's home is like, you know, uh, war headquarters. I don't know military

terms, but like, you know, neither does the pigeon. It doesn't need to right yeah it'll just automatically go back uh is that is that about about right from what you've researched yeah yeah yeah that's pretty much it i am yeah i wish you could send them specific places like just like pigeon find hitler and then it just goes you know but they don't do that. Yeah. That's Charlie Chaplin, you imbecile. Just pecking Chaplin like caught Hitler did it. But then they and this is truly an amazing ability. Again, they can go hundreds of miles back to their home from from basically anywhere. And we don't really know how they do it. We just have like clues. One of them is Smithsonian says that pigeons are best at homing during the day. So maybe the sun is useful

one way or another or light is useful. Also, we know pigeons have excellent vision. They are and they're very good at distinguishing things visually. National Wildlife Foundation says they're one of many birds that can see ultraviolet light in addition to the rest of the spectrum. And there have also been a bunch of studies where pigeons recognize things really well. There was one in 2015 where a team at UC Davis trained eight pigeons to do what human medical pathologists do, which is they looked at tissue samples and x-rays of human breast tissue, and they could tell which ones had cancer in them very effectively. Oh, wow.

Which is a bonkers skill. Dr. Pigeon. Yeah. MMD. Yeah, that's great. I would love to have a pigeon as a doctor, just like the door creaks open, you look down and it's a little pigeon in a lab coat, gets up, he's like, you know, coo for me. Could you coo for me?

Looking in your mouth. Yeah. No, I love that. Coo it to me straight, doc, when you're waiting for something. Bad. It's cuckoo. Yeah. How are my test results, Doc?

Cool. Well, that's a relief. You're okay? No, he made funny noises. I just figured that's good. It would have been bad noises. I don't know. Did a wacky bird noise.

It would have been bad noises. I don't know. Did a wacky bird noise. Oh, man. I would definitely watch Dr. Pigeon, the show. Oh, yeah. I'm into it. Yeah.

Good feathers type stuff. Yeah. Yeah. It's like Grey's Anatomy, but it's like Pooh's Anatomy. It's perfect. I would love that. The romantic lead is that pink necked green pigeon that the internet thinks is hot. Well, we cast him off the tweet.

I mean, come on. Dr. Pigeon, we have someone coming in with rare, rare disease we've never seen before, and they're pregnant. Drop the cracker. We'll just write this doctor show later. It's really fun. Patent pending, patent pending. Minion Golden Productions, patent pending. Writer skilled thingy, whatever that is that marks it.

You mail it to them, I think. I don't understand. Yeah. It's our IP now. Don't nobody touch it. Wenda, another thing we do know about pigeons is that they have large brains as birds go. Wow. Leanda Lynn Hopp says that ornithologists at Uppsala University in Sweden, Uppsala?

I'm sorry, Sweden. They did studies indicating that most urban birds have large brains compared to their body size, including pigeons. Smart birds. And that doesn't necessarily mean intelligence, but it could mean intelligence. Yeah. Yeah. And like brain size doesn't necessarily mean one animal is more intelligent than the other.

But often, not always, but often ratio of brain size to body mass does indicate more intelligent species of animals. It's not like it's not a rule. It's just kind of like generally speaking. Yeah, cool. It kind of makes sense to me that like an urban adapter pigeon would need some level of intelligence to be able to figure out their environment and, you know, get into stuff like how do you pick the lock on a dumpster.

Yeah, to be able to adapt to a city environment, you got to have some smarts. Yeah, we sort of have the indication from them getting through city life that there's, if not true intelligence in a broad way, at least some kind of skill that they have that maybe matches up with the big old noggins. You don't think that they do bird math? Oh, they could. I don't know what it is. Now we have a bird teacher show, right? It's like a rowdy

group of high schoolers and one bird teacher has to fix it. Anyway, a lot of ideas here. Stand and deliver. I'm never gonna get into college, bird teacher. You're right right i should try harder yeah the bird has a little leather jacket like i'm different from other teachers oh captain my captain so many good movies um when the the last thing is like a few other theories that are not confirmed but like maybe they're helpful for pigeons homing and one of them is that pigeons might be able to

like read the ground below them and use that as landmarks for figuring out where they're going oh that's interesting but they would in order to that, they would need to have visibility of the ground as they're leaving their home, right? I think so. In order to remember that, right? And this is theoretical. It's BBC News reported on a 10-year Oxford University study. They reported in 2004, the study said that they attached a bunch of trackers to pigeons and then tracked them homing. And it said that some pigeons followed motorway junctions or went towards specific landmarks to remember where they are based on the data. Oh, that's interesting. And team member Dr. Tim Guilford said the pigeons often made diversions to follow roads home,

even when there were more straightforward routes. Because they're just flying. They can go any way they want. But they seem to use the ground as kind of a guidance to get back if they could. They don't need to obey any traffic laws because it's Skylaws. And there's another movie. You want the truth? You can't handle the coup.

You want the truth? You can't handle the coup. That is interesting. I wonder if they use more than one technique. So maybe they use for like really long distances. Maybe they use the position of like the sun, like as they get closer, like they can use landmarks to kind of specifically triangulate where their home is. I wouldn't be surprised if they kind of used more than one method to figure it out. Yeah, that makes sense, too. Because the other theories that could also nest with it, one is that pigeons might have a geomagnetic compass, like an ability to detect the magnetic field of the earth to help. magnetic compass, like an ability to detect the magnetic field of the earth to help. And then the last one is that pigeons might be able to hear infrasound. And infrasound is an incredibly low frequency of sound. There's an amazing story about it by Robert Krulwich of

Radiolab fame, but he wrote it for National Geographic. And he talks about experiments finding that pigeons can hear tones that are 11 octaves below middle C, so far below human range. So dubstep must just make them go crazy. Oh, they must be so mad about it or love it. I don't know. Either way. Has anyone tried dubstep on pigeon experiments? Has anyone tried dubstep on pigeon experiments?

Yeah, because one of the main stories that has led people to think this is that apparently there was a pigeon race in 1997. The race was from France across the English Channel to England. But they got like thousands of racing pigeons together to do this. And then almost all of them didn't make it. And so people were just waiting in England wondering what happened to their homing pigeon. And the theory is that when the race was happening here in 1997 across the channel, there was also a flight by the Concorde. I don't know if people remember that it was like an experimental super plane to go very quickly between france and england but they think that might have messed up the infrasound and messed up all the pigeon routes because they depend on it that's interesting what happened like did they ever find the pigeons

they found one after five years because somebody in france like found it kind of lost and confused and then took care of it and then after and then like when it got out, it went home, basically. Did it like tell stories of like, like being beamed up into the sky and like weird, like, like gray, gray bird aliens doing weird experiments on them? Because I don't know, it sounds a little bit like an abduction. This is a good segue into my pigeon Scientology cult. Folks, if you're looking for an organization to join, a pigeon wrote a great book about his experiences. L. Ron Coobird.

Tom Coos. Yeah. I've racked my brain for any pigeon puns, and all I can do is like anything that sounds vaguely like coo. Cooing stuff. Yeah, that's it. That's the only joke I have. It's a funny noise. It is a funny noise. What can you do?

Yeah. Yeah. folks that is the main episode for this week my thanks to katie golden for flying into action for a topic that only she could do justice to anyway i said that's the main episode because there is more secretly incredibly fascinating stuff available to you right now. If you support this show on Patreon.com, patrons get a bonus show every week where we explore one obviously incredibly fascinating story related to the main episode. This week's bonus topic is the surprisingly important pigeons of the First World War. Visit SIFpod.fun for that bonus show, for a library of more than three dozen other bonus shows, and to back this entire podcast operation. And thank you for exploring pigeons with us.

Here is one more run through the big takeaways. pigeons with us. Here is one more run through the big takeaways. Takeaway number one, pigeons and doves are pretty much the same thing, different branding. Takeaway number two, wild city pigeons are the descendants of domesticated pigeons, which are the descendants of wild rock pigeons. Takeaway number three, pigeons are not mammals, and all genders of pigeon can generate a secret throat version of milk. And for the first time ever, takeaway number four, we are still figuring out how homing pigeons do that.

Those are all four takeaways. Also, please follow my guest. She's great. Katie Golden tweets us at ProBirdWrites. She hosts the Creature Feature podcast weekly on iHeartRadio. I'm keeping that short because I'm sure many of you have already checked those things out. Also, please, please, please make a point of checking them out if you have not yet. Katie is one of the core people and guests and friends who have made this entire podcast possible. So I really, really am grateful to her, and I hope you proceed to check out her show after digging this one. Many research sources this week. Here are some key ones. I used a bunch of great resources from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, also a great show from the Audubon Society, which is a podcast and article series called Bird Note.

In particular, an episode they did called Pigeon Milk is a Nutritious Treat for Chicks. Also used a great book titled The Urban Bestiary by naturalist Leanda Lynn Haupt, and tons and tons of other articles and sources this week, especially from National Geographic. Find those and many more sources in this episode's links at sifpod.fun. And beyond all that, our theme music is Unbroken Unshaven by The Budos Band. Our show logo is by artist Burton Durand. Special thanks to Chris Souza for audio mastering on this episode. Extra, extra special thanks go to our patrons. I hope you love this week's bonus show.

And thank you to all our listeners. I am thrilled to say we will be back next week with more secretly incredibly fascinating. So how about that? Talk to you then.