Let’s take a moment to talk Shit.
You can tell a lot about the health of a pet by its poop.
Changes in its color or consistency are among the first warning signs that a pet may not be feeling well.
In birds, you will usually see changes in poop long before the changes in behavior that indicate illness, like irritability or lethargy.
When most people think of pigeon poop, This is what usually comes to mind:
Any place feral pigeons frequent.
But this is what poop from a healthy, well fed pigeon looks like:
A small, compact ball of the indigestible fiber left over from the hulls of the seeds they eat whole, with a tiny white cap of urate.
You can see the consistency from the others underneath it, where nesting straw has been mashed into them as Pippin has come and gone and arranged, and rearranged individual blades.
A reliably well fed and hydrated pigeon will usually leave stools that keep their round shape on impact with a texture slightly softer than well worked playdoh.
Pigeon poop can be sloppy after a big drink of water following a 6-12 hour period of having gone with out.
The bowel movement after their first drink of water in the morning, for example, may make a sloppy mess, but in a healthy, well fed pigeon, the solid part will still be brown, and there will be more water than the white urate.
Look at this third picture again:
That wet mess of solids on mostly urate, with a mucus-y shine and slimy texture, is indicative of a heavy gut load of intestinal parasites.
Not just most ferals, but most racing, performing, and exhibition pigeons (since there are often housed out doors) are infested with the nematode Capillaria, the round worm Strongyloides, or the protozoan Coccidia.
While usually sub-clinical, an active infection of Salmonella will turn the poop a distinctive sulfur yellow to lime green.
But poop is only pure white,
Like those streaks and splatters most people associate with feral pigeons, when the birds have not had access to solid food in 12 hours or more.
Nearly all feral pigeons perpetually teeter on the brink of starvation, and it shows in their poop.
They are strict granivores, meaning that they can only digest seeds: the embryonic tissue of plants.
With cities being so carefully landscaped, often with the only plant life available being in the form of flower beds and trees, with grasses only in public parks and mowed too short to bloom and seed, the food they can actually digest is mighty hard for the average feral pigeon to find.
Barn ferals tend to be much more healthy for access to seed and animal feed.
But spilled garbage and the hand outs of the people that like them enough to feed them are literally all the food city ferals have access to.
And while bread is made from grain, milling that grain and baking it into bread breaks it down, making it easier for a HUMAN to digest, but HARDER for a pigeon.
They like the taste of it, and eating some as an occasional treat won’t do a pet bird any harm, but that’s the VAST bulk of the food feral pigeons have access to.
It would be like a humans having to wander for miles every day to find food, but only being able to find potato chips, snack cakes, and the occasional slim jim.
That human would not have a long, or healthy life.
Now imagine that person ALSO had two different kinds of lice, mosquitos, and a parasitic fly sucking their blood from the outside, a painful cheesy growth in their throat that could block off their trachea or esophagus if it goes untreated long enough, two species of worms eating the nutrients they manage to find before their intestinal lining gets the chance to absorb it, and a protozoan eating their intestinal lining, with no hope of getting any of those things treated.
And you have a pretty accurate representation of what it’s like to be a feral pigeon living “free”.
I am all for wild animals living free in the environment for which they were adapted.
But pigeons are not wild life, and they were not adapted to cities.
ESPECIALLY not on the continent of North America.
The pigeons that were brought here as military messengers, meat, and entertainment had been domesticated for thousands of years already.
When homers were no longer faster and more reliable messengers than phone lines or radio waves, they were no longer profitable to keep, pigeons were released.
This was common practice in the places they came from.
But in Europe, Africa, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia, where Rock Doves are native, there WAS natural habitat for the exclusively cliff nesting birds to relocate to, as well as open lofts that would welcome the boon of free livestock.
But there is nothing like their actual habitat: A high cliff near the sea, between desert and grass land, in north America.
So, as lofts shut down and were (as they still are to this day by racers) habitually destroyed to discourage the birds no one would buy from returning, there was nowhere for the unwanted birds to go EXCEPT the tall, concrete buildings, and the metal structure under bridges and billboards.
The problem of feral pigeon mess, from the structural damage caused by the pure uric acid they excrete on an empty stomach to their potential as vectors for zoonotic disease is one of our own making.
That’s why I don’t re-abandon feral pigeons that come into rehab by releasing them.
I get them medical care. Heal their wounds, treat their infections, clean out their parasites…
And then I treat them like any good shelter would treat a stray dog:
I evaluate their temperament, and find them a permanent home where they can be well cared for and as happy as possible.
And for the same reason that seeing mangy, thin stray dogs roam the street treated an invasive pest species; ignored at best and chased off or exterminated at worst, would horrify and haunt the average american…
My goals are to make hoards of feral pigeons a thing of the ignorant past by encouraging the development of shelters for them like we have for dogs, cats, parrots, and other exotic pets.
Wildlife, like Mourning Doves, should absolutely be returned to the wild if at all possible.
Urban wildlife, like raccoons, are natives that have willingly ventured into cities and found them a welcoming, supportive environment, for which that animal happened to be naturally well suited.
Invasive wildlife, like Collared Doves, happen to be well adapted to the new environment into which they were released. T
hey can be a danger to natives, so culling is preferred over release in the event that they can’t be penned.
But still being wild animals, being caged stresses them severely.
Pigeons fit NONE of these categories.
They did not “invade” cities.
They were abandoned there the minute they ceased to be profitable, they had no where else to go, and we treat the mess like it’s their fault.
We have done pigeons a terrible disservice by having entirely forgotten that they are domestic livestock.
And any one that calls a pigeon in north America a “wind animal that should be free” perpetuates and encourages that abandonment of responsibility.
