Recent studies have suggested that they navigate using human structures as well as natural ones: they follow roads and canals, and have been observed going round roundabouts before taking the appropriate exit. They stay close to the land, often flying at street level, below the height of the rooftops.
‘Modesty,’ Marianne Moore wrote, ‘cannot dull the lustre of the pigeon.’ They are able to recognise individuals from photographs, and a neuroscientist at Keio University in Japan has trained them to distinguish between the paintings of Matisse and Picasso. Pigeons can recognise video footage of themselves shown with a five-second delay (three-year-old children find it difficult to comprehend a two-second delay). If you mark a pigeon’s wing and let it look in a mirror it will try to remove the mark, realising that what it sees is a reflected image of its own body. Pigeons are more intelligent than we give them credit for, one of the few animals – along with great apes, dolphins and elephants – able to pass the mirror self-recognition test.
Human subjects managed the same task 38 per cent of the time. Pigeons were able to find the fabric 93 per cent of the time.
The birds were placed in observation bubbles mounted on the bottom of helicopters and trained to peck at buttons when they spotted a scrap of coloured fabric floating in the sea. In the 1970s and 1980s, the US Coastguard trained pigeons to recognise people lost at sea as part of Project Sea Hunt. They can see far further and with greater clarity than we can. When not mangled or amputated by wire and string, their feet – which the poet Mina Loy described as their ‘coral landing gear’ – are strong, elegant and reptilian. We think of pigeons as grey but they are composed of an oceanic palette: deep blues and greens flecked with white, like the crest of a wave. Feral pigeons are synanthropes: they thrive in human environments where they can skim a living off our excess, nesting in the nooks and crannies of tall buildings that mimic the cliff faces on which their genetic ancestors – Columba livia, the rock dove – once lived. Of course, as suggested in the book, Already Ready, the teacher needs to write books, too! My book was titled “Don’t Let the Pigeon Go to Pre-K”, in which the Pigeon tries to convince the audience to let him go to school and promises he will follow the rules and use good manners.T here are 290 species of pigeon in the world, but only one has adapted to live in cities. The titles and themes the children came up with were a lot of fun and very creative. I thought it was neat how this child drew the Pigeon’s head peeking into the page. We know this is a thought bubble rather than a talk bubble because of the 5 dots leading from the Pigeon’s head to the bubble. On this page, a child used the dark squiggle lines above the Pigeon’s head to show his emotions. The first square shows a talk bubble, the second square shows the Pigeon crying (because he doesn’t get what he wants), and the third square shows the Pigeon smiling (because he has thought of a new strategy to try to convince you to give him what he wants). On this page, a child drew the Pigeon’s different actions in smaller squares, like Willems does in some of the Pigeon books. This page shows how a child used the “talk bubble” element to show that the Pigeon is saying something: This picture is a female version of the Pigeon for a book in which a girl pigeon was needed: One of the great things about these books is that the Pigeon is so easy to draw. It was very interesting to see how they incorporated similar elements into their books. One day, my class decided to make their own Pigeon books. The Pigeon books work great for this: we talk about the difference between the thought bubbles and the talk bubbles how Willems sometimes uses smaller squares on a page to show the Pigeon’s different actions how Willems uses dark scribble lines or red eyes to show the Pigeon’s strong emotions, such as anger or sadness. Since we do “ Bookmaking” (as in the book Already Ready: Nurturing Writers in Preschool and Kindergarten) in our class all year, we spend time during the year talking about elements and features of the books we read. The wonderful thing about the Pigeon books is that the audience can interact with the Pigeon.
#Pigeon book series
We have almost every book in the Pigeon series in our classroom. My class loves Mo Willems’ books! They just can’t get enough.