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dishonored, despised. No birder exults, adding you to their
life list. On the dinner plate: squab. And yet: Able to fly 93 miles per hour on your
black-barred wings. Your longest recorded flight: 7200 miles, France
to Saigon, in twenty-four days. One 1918 trench-taken messenger pigeon, Kaiser, holds your record life-span:
thirty-one years. Also: America’s longest-held POW. First victory-paraded, then kept for
breeding. Another messenger, shot down and battle-blinded on the
Meuse-Argonne line, took wing again, delivered the capsuled
note: “We are along the road parallel to
276.4. Our own artillery is dropping a barrage
directly on us. For heaven’s sake, stop it.” One hundred and ninety-four soldiers
lived. As did the bird, Cher Ami. Saved by an
Army medic, given the French Croix de Guerre, standing now in a Smithsonian display
case, on one taxidermed leg. Domesticable, a consorter with humans. For this, your lives treated, too often,
as ours are. Subject – objects – of many studies and
books. For instance, Making Pigeons Pay: A
Manual of Practical Information On the Management,
Selection, Breeding, Feeding, and Marketing of Pigeons, © 1946 by Wendell Mitchell Levi. Once a
child who raised pigeons. Some who keep you in rooftop pens and
train you to race have loved you, waiting for months for one who didn’t
return. City-falcons hunt you. City-humans, sitting on benches, share
with you their bread. Your ring-necked cousins
arrive each late June to eat my tree’s
ripening mulberries. Crows larger, louder, less peaceful, come
then to drive them away. Your average weight, a large coffee mug’s
twelve ounces. Your lives in the wild, 2.4 years. Wing tip to wing tip, roughly
twenty-three inches. Your first-light conversations held on an air conditioner’s
twelfth-story pigeon-sized ledge – even the furious-at-being-wakened
recognize this sound as true affection. We, who tell children they must not touch
you, gave you this habitat and story. You are like us. You want to live. You do what you must. You preen. You
scavenge. Are kept – like us – off places to rest
on only by spools of barbed wire. Are
shooed. Are cursed. Like ours, your newborn are helpless. You live amidst and between us concealing
your nests, your dead, the first awkward flights of your young. You share the tending of eggs, the
feeding of hatchlings. Like us, you have learned the timing of
stoplights. Like us, you are adaptable, resilient,
ingenious. You return, when needed, to dwelling on
riverside cliffs. Meaning: you will be among the slower to
vanish. Meaning also, among the longer to suffer. You will glean, like us,
this world for as long as you can. Lift with your strong, slightly comical
cere-topped beaks its joy-scraps, grief-crusts,
recalcitrant seeds. In flocks crowding any corner and park, you will hide amid flapping flusters and
flushes of iridescence your pigeonish judgments, jokes,
meditations; keep opaque from our knowing also the
instruments – magnetic? aural? optic-nerve sextant? –
of your solitary, almost spiritual,
home-seeking navigation.
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