A scientist wants to resurrect Passenger pigeons

And I'm fascinated by our obsession with multitudes.

Last Fall, in the Vancouver Art Gallery, I found Pat McCarthy’s display of pigeons. McCarthy photocopied his own live pigeons for the art installation. He turned the prints into ceramic plates. They’re arranged on the wall in a large grid, with the age of each pigeon printed on the tiles. The prints are all in sepia and slightly warped and the breast feathers in some look, inexplicably, like bombs. Or I imagined this, because the fanzine the pigeons appear in is titled “Born to Kill”.

‘Pigeon Plumage’ by Pat McCarthy, on display at Vancouver Art Gallery. Image by author.

Outside the gallery, tentative sunlight struck a city window and bounced back to burn my face. I texted my boyfriend pictures of the sepia feathers. “Pigeons aren’t actually native to British Columbia,” he replied. I watched regular city pigeons circle a pink taco truck and then nestle into the gargoyles peering down on Vancouver traffic.

In 1606, French settlers brought pigeons – the Rock Doves we see everywhere in our cities now – to the New World of Nova Scotia. They brought them for all the reasons you’d expect; a means of communication, meat pies, and familiarity.

The Rock Doves appeared at a time when Canada was already teeming with Passenger Pigeons. Their flocks flew in the millions. “One naturalist near Niagara-on-the-Lake watched a flock head south into the United States for fourteen straight hours,” wrote Adam Bunch. “They formed a column a kilometer and a half wide and five hundred kilometers long. And that was nothing. Sometimes, they could blot out the sun for days.” I try to imagine it: birds creating a storm of shade and feathers for days in a row. Bunch quotes Chief Simon Pokagon of the Potawatomi’s writing in 1895: “I have stood by the grandest waterfall of America and regarded the descending torrents in wonder and astonishment, yet never have my astonishment, wonder, and admiration been so stirred as when I have witnessed these birds drop from their course like meteors from heaven.”

I’m fascinated by human fascination with multitudes. Last October, scientist Ben Novak went on air to talk about bringing Passenger Pigeons back: “Basically, what made that species so famous was in the early 1800s, before they went extinct in 1914, they were the most abundant bird in North America — likely the most abundant bird on the planet.” Novak says there were five billion pigeons on the continent.

In the corner of the exhibition, I found perfume bottles by Megan Hepburn trying to attain a “white scent” by putting all scents together, canceling each other the way light does. The blank white of excess. The list of ingredients ran down the wall and my eye snagged on a few of the surprising ones: clove, pear skins, plastic wrap, hay, diesel, buttered popcorn, sunscreen, unripe strawberry, maple sugar, cat vomit, sea foam, shoe polish, balsam fir needles, butter, wax.

This big world we encounter: what happens if we can inhale it all at once? What would it smell like? How do we capture the big we inhabit?

‘Pigeon’ by Maaike VanderMeer with foraged inks. Do not reproduce without permission.

In the 1830s, for four days straight, hunters shot down Passenger pigeons over Toronto. Streets clogged with dead birds. The same thing was happening in the States. The last two Passenger Pigeons in Toronto were killed in 1890. They’ve been officially extinct for over a century.

Last weekend I took a workshop with Negesti Kaudo. She invited us to write our bodies as a sense and it reminded me, somehow, of Hepburn’s “white scents”. I can name a few of my ingredients: ink and dried acrylic paint and black tea and fresh garlic, but what does it add up to? Scientists used to think that the iron-rich neurons in the beaks of pigeons had a magnetic draw to the earth, giving them a pull home. Do we want to locate the homing instinct in pigeons and trout and salmon because it is an instinct we lack?

Scientists still don’t know, exactly, how pigeons do it. Their current best guess is that their brain cells can read “the direction intensity and polarity of the earth’s magnetic field” via their inner ear, says J. David Dickman, a neuroscientist who researches pigeons.

Pigeons are the first creature to be domesticated by humans and have taken messages through war zones throughout all of our history – Julius Ceasar sent pigeons, as did Genghis Khan; more recently, pigeons carried news of the Dieppe landing (many pigeons earned medals in both World War I and II). Imagine being carted through all those smells in a dark basket – dried blood, fresh sweat, saddle leather, fear. To be tossed into the sky by a stranger’s hands. To beat your wings home, one thousand and one hundred miles of confidence. In 1606, did any pigeons attempt to cross the ocean from Nova Scotia back to France?

What happens when you’re set free just beyond what you can map? Novak plans to use museum specimens of the extinct Passenger pigeon to build their DNA back into existing pigeons – and reintroduce the species in the next five years.

Last week, as a circle of friends played a question game, someone drew a card which read: “If you could know the whole truth about one thing, what would it be?” I suggested a re-write: “If you could choose one question to never know the answer to, what would it be?” Here’s one: What does it mean, to transfer DNA into a living bird?

A pigeon adoption page says that if you want a pigeon to trust you, sit down and put your hands behind you (hands are threatening) and speak softly.

When I was a teenager and we bought scrawny chickens in the Congo Basin, we were told to tie them to a tree for the first three nights. After that, they’d always come back to that tree to roost. It takes a young pigeon (a squab) four flightless weeks to learn a new home. Minimum. It’s harder to train adult pigeons; the trick is to trap them until they hatch their young in your barns. Pigeons are monogamous birds and babies don’t leave their nest until they’re almost adult-sized. The family won’t look for a new home. What is a home? – we still don’t know the whole truth of this question.

If he’s scared, the pigeon adoption page says, hold your pigeon against your body and cover his head with a piece of cloth or your hand to calm him down. Don’t ever, the site says, force a bird to drink. “How long until a pigeon trusts a human?” It doesn’t promise anything. •

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In big news (for me!) I just enabled paid subscribers on this Substack. You will still get weekly lyric essays and art for free, every Thursday. I believe firmly in the generosity of creativity, and that if you believe in this work and have the means to do so, you’ll pay it forward and keep it free for others. I have deep gratitude for everyone who reads and interacts with these posts, and don’t intend to gatekeep the content.

But! I do get to dream up big things with this new option. I’ve been posting weekly Substacks for the last ten months, and spending about four hours a week on each post. I’ve tried to stretch more into research, because I love it, but I simply can’t justify putting in even more time. I’m hoping that, with paid subscribers, I can eventually shift into more research to bulk up these essays. And because I’m a sucker for physical art being in people’s hands, I’ll be crafting art zines for paid subscribers that are completely unique and not available anywhere else. For now I’m committing to mailing these once a year, but if I get hooked you might see them more often!

In the meantime, as I pieced together this essay I realized that I write about pigeons more than I expected. And I paint pigeon-y birds, too. I meant to have a few brand-new art cards ready for you today, but I print local at a lovely, family-owned shop. Their machine had a missing part mailed from Indiana five days late because of a snow storm — you know how it goes? Anyways, if you’re in Indiana, stay warm out there. And I’ll have delightfully irrelevant pigeon cards to announce next week.

Here’s more bird content for you: