Anja Murray: Pigeons and doves — and peace and learning
A pair of pigeons at The Lough, Cork: The feral pigeons we see in urban streets and parks have been domesticated longer than any other bird, a result of millennia of selective breeding. Picture: Larry Cummins
As I write, a crab apple tree across the street is bustling with life. Its small, rust-red ornamental apples have drawn in a flock of fluffed-up wood pigeons, each seated comfortably among the branches, feasting on the small fruits plucked apart from the still-green leaves. The birds’ rosy-hued feathers at their nape are accentuated by the soft afternoon sunlight.
I pull out one of my bird identification books, to check again the difference between woodpigeons, pigeons, and doves, and return to the window, but the birds have moved on already. Woodpigeons, pigeons, and doves are closely related, with very similar appearance, shared behaviours and traits. They belong to the family of birds called Columbidae.
The feral pigeons we see in urban streets have been domesticated longer than any other bird, a result of millennia of selective breeding. Rock doves, the wild ancestor of feral pigeons, are a species adapted to live on cliffs, where their grey plumage helps them to blend in with their surrounds. Now, feral pigeons hang about city buildings, substitute habitats for the cliffs their wild ancestors were accustomed to. And now too, rock doves are rare and pigeons are one of the most abundant birds in the world.
Researchers investigating wild rock doves have found some populations of original wild rock doves living on the Outer Hebrides off Scotland and on islands off the west coast of Ireland, the last of their species. Their genes live on in the genetic hybrids that descend from the interbreeding between rock doves and domesticated pigeons.
There appear to be a number of reasons why rock doves domesticated in the first place.
The most obvious is for food. Young rock doves grow big before they fledge, so were presumably easy to catch. This same trait made them easy to domesticate, and since ancient times, across many cultures, young rock doves have been prized for their meat. It made sense to domesticate them, in the same way that humans domesticated mouflon to produce sheep and aurochs to produce domesticated breeds of cattle.
Dovecotes, special buildings for housing pigeons, have been widespread and common right across Europe and the Middle East since the earliest known times. They were often exquisitely built, merging beauty and utility, their architecture reflecting the vernacular style of each time and place. There were dovecotes in ancient Egypt and Iran and they are well documented in ancient Rome where they were known as a columbarium. In Ireland, dovecotes are documented since Norman times, and today disused dovecotes can be found right across the country, including several in old Cistercian abbeys. The pigeons who lived in the dovecotes were used for both their meat and their manure — the latter being especially valuable for nutrient-hungry vegetable gardens and fields of hemp.
Having been domesticated since 3000 BC, people’s close proximity with doves and pigeons led them to observe their impressive memory and navigational abilities. In ancient times, people in Syria and Persia used rock doves and pigeons as messengers — a practice that continued through medieval times and was widely used during World War I. Pigeons are able to detect low-frequency soundwaves that travel hundreds of miles through the air and this is related to their incredible ability to navigate.
This family of birds is also absurdly clever. Nowadays, pigeons are used in experiments to understand animal intelligence and cognitive ability. A famous study trained pigeons to distinguish between paintings by Monet and Picasso by giving them food when they pecked at a button in response to works by Picasso, but not for works by Monet.
Then, when the pigeons got the gist of each artist’s style, they were shown paintings they had never seen before, and were still able to distinguish between those by Monet and those by Picasso. Even more impressively, these pigeons were subsequently able to distinguish between impressionist and cubist artworks by other painters. Pigeons have also been trained to recognise written words, so you could say that pigeons have been successfully taught to read. And they can count from 1-9. In memory tests, pigeons are capable of outperforming humans.
Being such clever birds, and living for millennia in close proximity to humans, we attribute a wealth of symbolic significance upon these gentle beings. Pigeons and doves have through many cultures and epochs been seen as divine, or considered symbols of peace and prosperity. In the 3rd century BC, the Sumerians in Mesopotamia bred white doves from wild rock doves which were seen as sacred. In ancient Egypt, hieroglyphs show how rock doves were tamed and kept in vast numbers, their purity and innocence making them suitable for ritual religious sacrifice. In ancient Greece and Rome, pigeons and doves were sacred to the goddesses Aphrodite and Venus, who represented love and beauty. They also symbolised Eirene and Pax, the goddesses of peace In India, pigeons are portrayed as gentle, romantic, and loving, thus symbolise purity and peace and are revered by Hindus, Sikhs, and Muslims alike. In Buddhism, pigeons are regarded as gentle and compassionate animals that can help humans attain enlightenment and peace of mind.
In Judaism, doves are taken to represent the spirit of God. A biblical story tells how the Holy Spirit descended upon baby Jesus at his baptism and gave him the power to preach the gospel of peace. Many Muslims have traditions of feeding pigeons as an act of reverence, a spiritual good deed. I sometimes watch a woman in the neighbourhood who feeds feral pigeons on the pavements, and wonder if she is honouring these birds as reincarnations of departed souls.
Doves and pigeons are highly intelligent, adaptable, and beautiful birds, better at finding their way than we are — perhaps more noble too. There is ample basis for all that we attribute to them, and now, as thousands continue to be killed in Palestine, we need symbols to guide and remind us of our shared humanity. The similarities between people are so much more than the differences, and we need a flood of prompts for peace as calls for a ceasefire strengthen.
