Pigeon Watching

January

Stock image of a stock dove: from Dave Curtis https://www.flickr.com/photos/davethebird/7136330625/

Pigeons. But you wrote about birds last week. Pigeons. And there are no images of pigeons in your photo collection. Pigeons. You need to go on a walk and get some better inspiration. Pigeons. You don’t even know what you’re writing about.

It’s all true. I come to pigeons in ignorance and from a seated position. I watch them pottering beneath the apple tree as I drink my tea. On weekends and half-term holidays like today, I can sit for hours staring at their comings and goings, their mating attempts and their decorous arrangement with the local squirrel to share proceeds from spilled bird feeders. In a world that has felt rather disastrous recently, pigeons offer mindfulness.

They aren’t just pigeons at all, of course. They are stock doves or rock doves and pretty little collared doves - at most, we get a fat wood pigeon strolling down the path, enormous next to the tiny dunnocks that creep out to gather seed from the ground. They are all beautiful, shimmering with greys and violets, and add a kind of solemn calm to what can sometimes be a hectic scene in our back garden. They can also bring comedy, waddling around, bothering each other at times, or flying off in that distinct way Columbidae have, flap flap soar, like skateboarders in the sky.

It is all rather different to the pigeonscape of my childhood memory. We are waiting for the bus home from a Saturday trip to Bedford. My mum and sister have been clothes shopping, and I have probably bought a new Choose Your Own Adventure book at WH Smiths. Me and Dad had orange squash and coffee in the café at the bottom of the Harpur Centre, sharing a warm sausage roll between us. I have saved some of the pasty crumbs, and, hoping nobody notices, quietly drop them on the concrete floor. Immediately, a hoard of feral pigeons rush to salvage the treasure, scattering the sound of frantic wings and gurgling calls amongst the crumbs. The bus station is painted with their excrement and feathers.

The pigeons of Bedford town get a bad rap. There were frequent calls to control or destroy them as the ‘rats of the air’ when I was a young girl, and I notice that these demands continue to dominate the local news. But pigeons have also played the central role in a recent and charming community project called ‘Hometown Birds’, which asked residents to decorate paper birds and tell their migration stories. These words and images will now form ‘a public art trail of 100 pigeon designs leading from Bedford bus station to Pigeon Square.’

IPicture on rght fromhttps://www.permission2.co.uk/blog/hometown-birds-24-university-of-bedfordshire

There is another pigeon narrative from my youth, one that has been on my mind recently. The BBC animated series Pigeon Street aired for just two seasons in 1981, although it was repeated in subsequent years and feels like part of the fabric of my childhood culture. The short episodes, devised by Michael Cole and David Yates, featured a brilliantly eclectic cast of characters - ‘people you might meet’ every day on the eponymous Pigeon Street, from white British long-distance driver Clara to William the window cleaner and his South-Asian family, to Mr Jupiter who is an astronomer and sleeps on a park bench. Friendly cartoon stock doves observe the action taking place from the rooftops and trees of a typical urban neighbourhood: socially, economically, and ethnically diverse. It is a celebration of difference and togetherness, one redeeming pigeons as the benign gods of this world and with the best theme tune in the history of children’s television.

The pigeon folk in my garden remind me of the hopeful vision this programme brought to a period of British history marked by unrest and division. When I sit and watch them, thinking ‘I should get out for a walk’, I’m also humming a tune and imagining what would happen if I lived in Pigeon street: ‘here are the people you could meet, here are the people who would share the sights, the sounds, the air; where pigeons beat their wings.’