I love the city, but I hate all the pigeons bobbing about the pavements, flying by my head, and poo-ing on railings, cars – and me (once, en route to a first date). They’re rats with wings, they’re gross, and they’re very much not starlings or blackbirds, the kind of feathered friends which inspire beautiful songs. City dwellers like me detest city pigeons , and see them as nothing but dirty, disease-ridden nuisances.
Only this week, a pigeon was shot with an air gun in Lancashire and dumped in a bin, and last month, the German town of Limburg voted to slaughter their population of 700 pigeons in a mass cull. They’re probably some of the most disliked animals on earth. But not everyone sees them as villains – in fact, there are people who feel great affection for pigeons, and believe that London’s three million feral pigeons are fascinating, likeable, and unfairly discriminated against.
One of the people who believe pigeons are wrongly maligned is Florence Wilkinson, author of Wild City: Encounters with Urban Wildlife , a book about better appreciating and understanding creatures in all kinds of urban spaces , from the sewers to the sky, from rats to pigeons. I ask her whether she’ll take me on a pigeon safari around a particularly pigeon-y bit of London, to see whether I might be able to see them as glorious rather than grim. On a sunny June morning, we head to Mornington Crescent underground station, near Camden in north London, where Florence knows of an es.
