People think they know pigeons. Waddling, slovenly birds that eat bits of bread and corn chips and junk, fluttering down awkwardly to the concrete, barely avoiding the hurrying city-dwellers who take a quick glance at them from the corner of their eyes for the sole purpose of reciprocating their avoidance, with considerably more disdain. That is the city pigeon in a nutshell, albeit a somewhat harsh and judgmental nutshell. In another time and another place, those birds lived in the wild too, on rocky cliffs of Southern Europe, North Africa, and the Near East. Once upon a time, the rock dove clattered over Corcyrean beaches as Odysseus dragged himself ashore; now they tumble between office buildings as cars and buses rumble by.
Then there are some people who have heard of the passenger pigeon. By adding that one word, the conjured image transforms into something entirely different, that of the most famously extinct bird in the history of our continent, the bird that once travell ed over the eastern United States in massive, sky-darkening flocks.
The multitudes of Wild Pigeons in our woods are astonishing. Indeed, after having viewed them so often, and under so many circumstances, I even now feel inclined to pause, and assure myself that what I am going to relate is fact. Yet I have seen it all, and that too in the company of persons who, like myself, were struck with amazement.
In the autumn of 1813, I left my house at Henderson, on the banks of the Ohio, on my way to Louisville. In passing over the Barrens a few miles beyond Hardensburgh, I observed the Pigeons flying from north-east to south-west, in greater numbers than I thought I had ever seen them before, and feeling an inclination to count the flocks that might pass within the reach of my eye in one hour, I dismounted, seated myself on an eminence, and began to mark with my pencil, making a dot for every flock that passed. In a short time finding the task which I had undertaken impracticable, as the birds poured in in countless multitudes, I rose, and counting the dots then put down, found that 163 had been made in twenty-one minutes. I travelled on, and still met more the farther I proceeded. The air was literally filled with Pigeons; the light of noon-day was obscured as by an eclipse, the dung fell in spots, not unlike melting flakes of snow; and the continued buzz of wings had a tendency to lull my senses to repose…
Before sunset I reached Louisville, distant from Hardensburgh fifty-five miles. The Pigeons were still passing in undiminished numbers, and continued to do so for three days in succession.
John James Audubon, Ornithological Biography, 1831
That was a wild pigeon, the modern conservationist will say with vicarious nostalgia. That was an untamed bird, a bird that would ceaselessly travel across the continent, miles and borders meaning nothing, a passenger who needed no vehicle beyond his own wings. And we humans couldn’t coexist with such wildness – passenger pigeons refused to be trammeled into shrunken reserves and constrained parcels of land, they needed vast spaces to fly over and would not retreat before our guns. When we found a mass roosting site, we shot them for the market by the tens of thousand, and we did it over and over until there were no more. Once upon a time, the passenger pigeon thundered over the beech woods of the east; now they pose silently in museum collections.
Millions know the cities’ rock pigeon from first-hand experience; thousands know the passenger pigeon by repute. Fewer, it usually seems to me, know the wild pigeon that we do have with us still. But the band-tailed pigeon still flies wild, still seeks the trees it has always sought, still passes in freedom over the not-quite-tamed west.
The life of a wanderer
Some brass tacks. What bird are we talking about? They are officially known today as band-tailed pigeons, but “wild pigeon” or “wood pigeon” are equally appropriate, serving to distinguish them from the modern city pigeon, itself more properly known as the rock pigeon or rock dove. (See this article for an overview of all our local doves and pigeons.) Those birds have abandoned the rocks and live in cities now; band-tails continue to live in the woods: to speak of “city” and “wood” pigeons encapsulates the essential difference. And they are wild, while city pigeons border on the merely feral.
Band-tails are handsome birds, especially with their air of health and clean, outdoor vigor that one rarely gets from watching pigeons in the park. Their feathers are a rich gray, just one shade darker than the gray of a peregrine falcon, fastest creature on the planet. My sister’s family owns a Tesla in that color because it is the classiest embodiment of speed: band-tail gray. (Personally, I ride a bike that is “spotted towhee black.”) Their beak and feet are a vivid gold that both stands out itself and makes the gray seem luxuriously lustrous. In classic dove fashion, band-tails sport a partial ring of white feathers around the neck, often described as a “collar.” But collars are for tame animals. I prefer “necklace,” which is something one wears to look pretty, or the straightforward elegance of “crescent.”
When they fly, especially when they slow and flap in spring courtship flights, you can see the broad but subtle band across their fanned tails. From many perspectives, the banded tail is hard to see, and the old name of “white-collared pigeon” and its like may feel more natural if you are seeking to name it by physical characteristics. (Officially, our only “collared dove” is the Eurasian collared dove, a steadily spreading immigrant, although most doves have at least a trace of necklace.)
What do we actually mean by “passenger,” by “ceaselessly travel across the continent”? It means that birds like the extinct passenger pigeon and today’s band-tailed pigeon do not maintain a year-round territory, nor do they have a defined winter territory to which they migrate and then stick. Instead, they roam, travelling across the woodlands of the west in search of temporarily abundant food sources like acorns or madrone berries. (Flocks may also descend en masse upon backyard feeders in yards near suitable habitat: if you get overwhelmed by pigeons, visit your local bird store for counsel and counteraction.) You might see birds like waxwings or robins doing something similar on a small scale in your neighborhood, travelling between berry-bearing trees, then favoring another part of the woods or neighborhood as certain food sources become depleted. But that is a small scale. Band-tails, like the passenger pigeons before them, operate on a big scale, travelling hundreds of miles with an easy casualness.
When nesting, they will, of necessity, constrain their movements and stay close to the nest, as do nearly all birds. Raising babies requires temporary acceptance of the sedentary life. But nothing else does. Most birds like to have a defined territory: some guard their mates or food sources all year-round, chasing off rivals, while most simply like to feel at home, with a knowledge of escape routes and safe roosts, amenable hunting posts and likely food trees. Band-tails don’t operate like that. They eat until they can eat no more (there is one much-cited record of a pigeon who ate 111 madrone berries, rendering him flightless and a de facto volunteer for stomach analysis), and then they move on: they won’t return to that tree. They will go find another, trusting in the plenitude of the wide world.
They are not stay-at-homes. Neither do our band-tails participate, at least not strictly, in the yearly north-to-south migration typical of many birds, nor the high-to-low altitudinal migration that montane species make. (The northwest populations do retreat southward in winter, but central and southern California birds never entirely leave.) It is easy to be amazed at the feats of long-distance migrants, and I advocate such wonderment as a healthy pastime: the bar-tailed godwit flies without food or water for seven days, covering 7000 miles from Alaska to New Zealand without a stop! The tiny rufous hummingbird, the “iron-blooded midget,” passes from the chilling tundra across the continent, buzzes intrepidly over the tossing Caribbean, and cruises at his ease into South America! But I will admit to you that it is the movement of the wild pigeons that I most enjoy watching.
Most people don’t think of them as observable migrants at all. In the common experience, they are simply a bird whose flocks we run into from time to time in the woods, in varying and unpredictable numbers. You might have a conceptual knowledge of their nomadic habits. But there isn’t a clear pattern to wrap your mind around, the way one knows that white-crowned sparrows will appear every fall and then leave every spring. But if you go to a migratory tunnel like Hawk Hill in the Marin Headlands, overlooking the Golden Gate, you will suddenly realize that the pigeons are on the move and the sky is their highway.
The raptor-heads will be out there in August, waiting for the first sharp-shins and the rising tide of red-tails. But off in the distance passes flock after flock of pigeons, by the dozen, by the hundred. They make it look easy. It is not an epic journey of individual endurance, it is not the desperate search for survival of a siskin or crossbill irruption. It is their everyday way of life, to one morning take off from a tree, to fly and to fly and to fly, and to alight at sundown in a new forest and in another world.
The death of the passenger
What was different about the passenger pigeon was the magnitude of its flocks: those sky-darkening clouds of millions of birds. That habit contributed to their demise, making them them easy targets for market hunters and unfit for survival once their numbers were reduced, like city dwellers stuck out in the woods alone and cut off from society’s supports.
Band-tails don’t conglomerate like that. But in other respects, they have much in common with the bird that was. They are the closest genetic relative to the passenger pigeon, similar in size and shape. There is a perhaps quixotic dream to resurrect the passenger pigeon with surviving museum DNA: the team originally planned to use band-tails as base material and foster mothers, but they have switched to rock pigeons for their more practical tamability.
They had to make that pragmatic concession, because band-tailed pigeons are the heirs of the passenger pigeon not just in feather length or body proportion or dietary preferences, but in that same unbounded wildness that Aldo Leopold evoked, celebrated, and pleaded for in his definitive statement on what we lost:
We have erected a monument to commemorate the funeral of a species. It symbolizes our sorrow. We grieve because no living man will see again the onrushing phalanx of victorious birds, sweeping a path for spring across the March skies, chasing the defeated winter from all the woods and prairies of Wisconsin.
Men still live who, in their youth, remember pigeons. Trees still live who, in their youth, were shaken by a living wind. But a decade hence only the oldest oaks will remember, and at long last only the hills will know.
There will always be pigeons in books and in museums, but these are effigies and images, dead to all hardships and to all delights. Book-pigeons cannot dive out of a cloud to make the deer run for cover, or clap their wings in thunderous applause of mast-laden woods. Book-pigeons cannot breakfast on new-mown wheat in Minnesota, and dine on blueberries in Canada. They know no urge of seasons; they feel no kiss of sun, no lash of wind and weather. They live forever by not living at all.
… Today the oaks still flaunt their burden at the sky, but the feathered lightning is no more. Worm and weevil must now perform slowly and silently the biological task that once drew thunder from the firmament.
“On a Monument to the Passenger Pigeon,” in A Sand County Almanac
The wind rises
We will never know the passing of the great clouds and endless armies of the passenger pigeons. In numbers, our band-tails are the merest shadow of those masses, like the lingering bands of elves in the forests of Middle Earth compared to the great cities of the First Age. But just as any encounter with elves is a magical moment that reminds one of the long centuries of the past, so does every encounter with wild pigeons today evoke and recreate that experience more vividly than mere books and written memories.
You can find the living wind today. Walking in the woods, you may be wary and alert, or you may be lost in your own private dreaming. In neither case will you see them first. Instead your first awareness of the pigeons’ presence will come with the sudden clatter of wings, the explosive lift off, the crackling of branches. You may catch a glimpse of those heavy bodies, hurtling from the treetops into the unencumbered sky above, the ever-present escape route where they know all the rules and need fear no pursuit. Or you may see nothing at all – you may be left with no more substantial evidence of their existence than the sound of a disappearance.
You may be walking on an open hillside, rounding a corner or in the middle of a wide exposed area: it makes little difference, for their arrival will be unannounced and unforeseen in either case. The whip of the wings, the whistle in the air, quickly rising and falling and fading away. My high school physics teacher took us to the side of the road to listen for the Doppler effect as cars came and went. Wild pigeons are the only birds I know that reliably recreate the same, with a collective mass and speed that compresses and extends the waves of sound with their unhurried haste. Like a train roaring down the track, they will not be stopping out of concern for you, because they have somewhere else to be. But their track is the sky, every station they stop at is unexplored territory, and they will never reach the end of the line.
Not while the woods last.
Header image adapted from photo by jacksnipe1990.
What a treat! Two Jack Gedney posts in one week. Especially enjoyed reading about pigeons on this rainy afternoon. (Already I miss the sun! And the mourning doves that visit our yard daily!) As much as I respect your wide and deep avian knowledge (and passion), I know that there will be a “link” to even wider flights of fancy. Always a good read.
I still look forward to “Nature in Novato–The Book”
Wow, Jack – what an amazing view of time past & present; you are a supremely gifted story teller – thank you for this excellent essay.
Jack – thank you. Good picture of the band.
We do have long neck “ringneck” pigeons that come to our yard periodically. Can you shed some light on where they come from? I’ve been told to shoo them away, if there is one there are thirty. We have had no less than twelve at a time.
If they are the pigeons shown here (band-tailed pigeons – dark gray bodies with white collars), then they are nomadic, as described here. They move around the western states in search of ephemeral food sources like madrone berries and acorns, with some north-to-south movement in fall, but overall a lot of unpredictability, leading to that common phenomenon of a large flock suddenly appearing in one’s yard.
If by “ringneck” you mean light colored birds with a dark band on the neck, those would be Eurasian Collared-Doves, which are an increasingly common non-native bird. They were significantly less common ten years ago, so it’s not uncommon to notice them as being abundant where they previously were not, though I believe they are generally non-migratory residents in our area.