A Hitchcockian nightmare: why are we in such a flap about pigeons?

A Norwich market, a Manchester railway station and a London street have become battlefields in a new culture war as people get in a right flap about pigeons.

With flocks swelling, concerns about hygiene and health are rising, but are we all to blame for all this feathered friction?

Ruffled feathers

There are “pigeon wars” in Norwich, said The Guardian. The birds are appearing in higher numbers around the city’s open-air market, causing “an increasing number of complaints from shoppers and traders”. Critics say the pigeons are “creating a Hitchcockian nightmare” by “defecating, stealing and spreading disease”.

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Norwich City Council hoped to introduce a hawk to “ruffle some feathers and deter” pigeons from the market, said the BBC. But the project was scrapped because local bird feeders ignored calls for them to not to feed the birds and in fact started feeding them more. This showed that pigeon feeders are “unshakeable in their determination to spread a bit of bird seed”.

The council also had to abandon a plan to use contraceptives, hidden within food, as a “humane and non-lethal” population control method, after finding out that this approach is not licensed in the UK. So local officials are now considering the possibility of fines for feeding pigeons at the market.

Another feathery flashpoint came in Harrow, London, in January, when a woman feeding pigeons on a street was arrested and handcuffed. She was detained by a “group of at least six” police officers and council enforcement workers, and a passer-by described the scene as “ridiculous”, said The Independent.

An even more direct approach was used at Manchester Victoria railway station, where “bungled” raids by “pest control marksmen” left nearly 100 birds “dead or maimed”, said The Telegraph. A spokesman for Northern Trains said the cull was ordered because pigeons were “posing a risk to colleagues and customers”.

A former love

“We loved them, once,” said Joseph Earp in The Guardian. “We might not remember that, but pigeons do.” They are the victims of “rampant animal welfare crimes”, being “pelted with rocks, chased from dwellings, killed and maimed en masse”.

But as with “so many problems we face, pigeons are a ‘problem’ that we have caused”. Feral pigeons are “descendants of homing pigeons that we kept and domesticated”. They’re “naturally predisposed to want to be close to us”, so “they gather where we gather” and they root through our rubbish.

So if they’re “dirty or disgusting”, it’s only because “we are dirty and disgusting”. We live in a “natural world that, rightfully, flinches from human touch”, but pigeons are one of the “few creatures that don’t”. Yet “for that, we punish them”.

Yes, feral pigeons can “carry disease”, Will Smith, an evolutionary biologist, told the BBC, but this is true of all wild animals and pigeons are “very resistant” to avian influenza. They “get the quite nasty name of ‘rats with wings’”, but this is “not quite fair”.