Street Rats and Rock Doves

When I returned to the city this past August after some months of wandering, it was with the discovery that I could no longer afford to rent a place in my old neighborhood in Brooklyn. It was a scary, impossible prospect for me to begin to look elsewhere, because Clinton Hill had been my home since I stumbled into this city three years prior. (It had been a Saturday morning in June. I had been equipped with a giant red suitcase, a dizzying lack of orientation, and an appointment to see room for sublet.) Eventually my devotion gave way to desperation, of course, and my options led east, and I followed.

Let me say first that there are many things I love about my new neighborhood: the laundromat, two doors down, whose primary laundress is a perpetual fountain of good news and good will, and whose proprietor HELPED ME MOVE MY LAUNDRY FROM THE DRYER INTO THE LAUNDRY BAG the other day. Down the block, there is a coffee shop devoid of pretension. On the corner, we have a new Duane Reade. Soon, we will have a bar. The trade-off for these, and the thing I have heretofore been avoiding, is the definitively urban feel of my new block. Myrtle Avenue is a major thoroughfare, especially for buses and ambulances, which translates to a healthy stream of strident, metallic noise. Instead of a stoop, I have a liquor store downstairs; instead of a row of brownstones across the way, I look out on an auto shop and a mural, battered and graffitied, involving the Brooklyn skyline, the American flag, and the words, “New York Will Overcome.” Two giant water towers dominate the sky above, to the north(ish), behind which the Empire State Building stands small and faded in the distance.

For reasons I cannot fully explain, I almost always enter and leave my new neighborhood by way of the adjacent old neighborhood, which gives me sometimes the feeling of a miner digging her way gradually deeper into a cave (and so I am, admittedly, ensconced). One evening, on my walk west up the gum-spotted sidewalk by an empty lot, I was struck by the way the people on the pavement ahead of me were standing. There are always people standing on the sidewalk, waiting for the bus or eating an orange or making up their minds, but these figures in front of me now were rooted into their places as if set down and arranged there, or as if they had grown this way, erect, arms loose and forgotten at their sides, faces lifted toward the sky. I slowed and stopped and turned to follow their gaze, which was directed past the streams of plastic trash caught in the chickenwire at the top of a high fence, to the sky beyond, where hundreds of pigeons were in flight above a rooftop coop. The birds were in motion together, making a wide, tilted loop. It was a breathtaking display of synchronization—hundreds of white underwings caught the sunlight blindingly and simultaneously, hundreds of bodies shrunk and expanded with the changing distance. I felt my arms drop to my sides and my feet sink dumbly into the ground.

Yesterday my curiosity finally outweighed my fear of censure, and I went in to the pet store at the base of the building to ask about the birds. Alice, who owns the pet store together with her husband, was at first defensive. “They’re yours?” I asked. “Yeah”-- and then, after studying her son’s homework, rebuking him, and signing it with reluctance-- “is there a problem with my pigeons?” I assured her I was just curious and thought the birds were beautiful, and her tone softened.

The pigeons belong to Alice’s husband, who’s been keeping birds since he was a boy in Puerto Rico, and who started this coop, or loft, twelve years ago. “We used to have more, probably about a thousand, but they’re just too expensive to keep,” Alice told me. She estimates that now there are three hundred pigeons on the rooftop loft, and that they eat about one hundred pounds of food per week. Alice’s older son, a teenage boy with a kind face and one completely bloodshot eye, punched some numbers into the calculator on the counter. “That’s three hundred dollars a week for the grain we feed them,” he said.

While keeping pigeons is a hobby for her husband (and thus, by sometimes exasperating default, for Alice), she told me that a lot of people from the neighborhood buy them for other purposes. The Hasids take them home and eat them because they are kosher, and others use their blood for remedies, including wart-removal. “People will come in here, sick and pale and unhealthy, and buy one of our birds, and the next day I see them walking around on the street, color in their cheeks, healed,” Alice said. Perhaps I betrayed some form of disgust or surprise at the notion of pigeon-eating, because Alice was quick to assure me that the birds on the roof are nothing like the pigeons I see on the streets. “Those are street rats,” said Alice, scrunching up her nose and dismissing the city’s pigeons with a wave of her hand, “those are dirty, disgusting rats with wings. They eat trash and live in filth. Our pigeons are a whole different breed. Our pigeons eat grain.”

Indeed, Alice’s pigeons look different from the ones I see all over the city, perusing the gutters or—just the other day—almost (seriously) flying into my head at the Shake Shack in Madison Square Park. And Alice’s pigeons probably are different: specialized breeds of the Rock Dove (also called the Rock Pigeon and City Pigeon) abound, and beyond that there are some 300 species in the pigeon/dove family. Domestic Rock Doves have been bred for carrying messages during wartime and spotting drowning victims from helicopters. The Homing Pigeon has been selectively bred for its ability to find its way home from distances of up to 1600 miles. Pigeon racers, of whom there are many in NYC and around the world, breed, raise, and train Homing Pigeons to compete in long-distance homing missions. Most scientists suspect that these birds use a combination of the sun’s position and a sense of the Earth’s magnetic field to navigate in the absence of landmarks, but some contention remains.

While the pigeon-racers and loft-keepers of New York breed their selective varieties, the feral ‘flying rats’ of the streets provide a charming, soft-focus lens through which to examine the human condition. Numerous groups exist here in NYC with the sole mission of providing support to these underdogs. The NYC Pigeon Club website declares, “If you love the under-appreciated things in life, this is the place to be.” Upon reading this, I cannot decide whether “this is the place to be” refers to the website or the city itself—both seem plausible. NYC Pigeon Rescue Central, another independent support group, keeps on its website a list of “needy birds” according to neighborhood, and offers advice and help to anyone in possession or contact with an injured or otherwise downtrodden bird.

The majority of the city’s residents take a less heartfelt approach toward the pigeon population. Most en vogue among people my age appears to be a bored sort of apathy (surprise!) when it comes to the birth, life, and death of the Rock Dove. Some, however, have taken up an anti-pigeon stance with vigor and vehemence. Last year, one Brooklyn councilman commissioned a report on “Curbing the Pigeon Conundrum” after stepping in what he referred to as a “puddle” of guano. The report led to talk of creating an official “pigeon czar” to oversee reduction efforts, which would include a strict ban on feeding pigeons, as well as birth control efforts involving contraception disguised as bird feed. As the councilman feared, pigeon defense groups sprung into action to defend the birds’ rights, and it seems that no consequential action was taken. Current law in NYC bans the feeding of all public park animals “except unconfined squirrels and birds”, and provides the commissioner with the right to “designate certain areas where all feeding of animals is prohibited.” (I wonder if there have been any cases of ornery policemen using strict interpretation of this language to slap heavy fines on dog owners with Milk-Bones).

As always in this city, there exists also a picaresque in the story of the pigeon and its protagonists, antagonists, and skeptics: in this case, our rogue comes in the form of the SUV-driving, net-toting pigeon-napper. Pigeon poaching has been reported in neighborhoods all over the city and met with varying degrees of alarm. Most often, the story goes like this: a man wearing all black lays down a net and spreads some seed on the ground. Pigeons flock to the spot and begin to eat, and suddenly the man pulls up the net and escapes with fifteen or twenty birds, invisible but surely ill-fated behind the tinted windows of the getaway vehicle. It is believed that most of these birds end up over state lines at “pigeon shoots,” which sound to me like parties for people who like guns but can’t aim. Of course, there exists other, more sinister speculation about the motivation and pervasiveness of bird-napping.

Our other characters—the protagonists, the antagonists, the skeptics—have responded to pigeon poaching in a variety of ways. While stealing pigeons, who belong to the state, is technically a crime, NYC law enforcement is not always hyper-motivated to stop it. In August, after a notably strange bird-napping in Chinatown, a spokesman for the police department was asked if “grabbing a pigeon, stuffing it in a box and running was a crime.” His response? “No, not really.”

On the other hand, New York State Senator Liz Krueger sent a letter last month to the Pennsylvania State Legislature asking them to ban the practice of pigeon shoots, in an effort to reduce pigeon poaching in NYC. And there are always the renegade good-guys, such as Bird Operations Busted, who describe themselves as “the hard-core part of the pigeon movement,” and whose goal it is to “unveil the mafia of netters.”

As for me (and I don’t think it’s just my deepening obsession with urban fauna speaking here), I’m a casual supporter of the city pigeon. As long as they aren’t flying at my head, I’m usually pretty happy to see them around, especially if I’m lucky enough to catch them at their totally adorable mating ritual (adorable, at least, up until the act itself). It’s fun to engage every now and then in a little light, soft-focus anthropromorphizing. And I’m happy, too, that Alice’s pigeons are here, punching out the dimensions of our sky into wildly striking patterns, stopping us dead in our tracks, causing us to look up.

Superstition: Was Stevie Wonder Wrong?

Having grown up in a fairly superstition-free household (exception: see my mother’s diet books), I have always experienced a good deal of discomfort when confronted with a real-life, authentic subscriber to the more overt and antiquated superstitions of our time. My first experience with superstition occurred while walking down the sidewalk with my friend Helen in the first grade. I can’t remember the exact circumstances, but I know that she suddenly shouted at me, triumphantly and mockingly, “stepped on a crack, you’ll break your mother’s back!” When pressed for an explanation linking cause and effect, Helen retreated into a self-satisfied smirk, and advised me with her arms crossed over her chest to “wait and see.”

In the end, Helen proved fond of spurning appeals to reason. Our friendship ended abruptly during the summer after first grade, on the swing-set behind her house. I had done something wrong, and followed up the misdeed with an apology. In response, she told me that “sorry doesn’t feed the bulldog.” Then she ran inside, to tell on me to her mother, who took her side.

The reason I bring up the matter of superstition now, in the first post of a blog supposedly devoted to science: a study published last week by the Royal Society, exploring the evolutionary basis for superstition and superstitious-like behavior. The study found, using a mathematical model, that it does indeed benefit an organism to adopt superstitious tendencies—to assign, incorrectly, a link between various causes and effects. The reason why? Something analogous to Pascal’s Wager—the argument for belief in God which holds that the possible benefit outweighs the possible risk (while the decision theory used in the argument is sound, the Wager itself is now understood to be based on a number of problematic assumptions). Taken into the realm of natural selection, the idea goes that the risk associated with holding a superstition (assigning false causality) is less than the risk of failing to assign causality when it does, indeed, exist.

Here in New York City, this scientific finding may help explain the wild success enjoyed by our perpetually-thriving population of rats. Rats have a number of things going for them in terms of survival—namely, a love of sex coupled with an iron-clad reproductive system, and a keen ability to avoid our attempts to kill them. Rats can taste poison in as small a dosage as .5 parts per million (think two grains of salt in a pound of peanut butter). Also—and here’s where the superstition comes in—rats pick up social cues about what to eat and what not to eat. If a rat returns to its burrow healthy and reeking of hangar steak from the restaurant down the alley, the other rats in the burrow will learn that the hangar steak is potentially safe. If, on the other hand, an unwell rat returns to the burrow smelling of, let’s say, the same restaurant’s ratatouille, the rats will be likely to consider the ratatouille a potential risk and avoid eating it. While these assignments of causality are probably wrong most of the time, they are more likely to benefit the community of rats than to harm it. Thus: superstition as an adaptive behavior.

I hate to think that Helen’s persistence in superstition could be, in any way, of evolutionary benefit. I also hate to think that the boy I (and everyone else) knew in high school who refused to wash his jock strap for the entire football season was somehow acting on a successful survival-related impulse. And yet, there’s something comforting in the idea that our own moronic conclusions can help keep us alive. Or is there?

Sources:
Article: "The evolution of superstitious and superstition-like behaviour"
Also, Jerry Langton's fun book about rats.