By Vitaly

Vitaly runs Hush Hollow, a small online store of field-guide-inspired apparel. He has been looking at the pigeons outside his window with rather more respect since he started reading about them.

Almost everyone knows the phrase “rats with wings.” Its origin is less tidy than the usual story suggests.

On 22 June 1966, the New York Times quoted Thomas Hoving, then New York City’s parks commissioner, calling the pigeon “a rat with wings” in an article about plans to restore Bryant Park. The remark arrived under a subheading that read “And There’s the Pigeons,” tacked onto the end of a paragraph about litter and vandalism, and it closed the piece.

A month earlier, Hoving had already said something very close to it. The New Yorker of 21 May 1966 followed him on a bus tour of the city’s parks. The group stepped out at De Witt Clinton Park, where pigeons were shuffling around underfoot, and one of the wives asked him how he felt about them. “A pigeon is a rat with feathers,” the Commissioner said, and then credited the line to the city’s Board of Health. Hoving carried the phrase into print, but by his own account he did not invent it.

Fourteen years later, Woody Allen put the better-known version into Stardust Memories. A pigeon gets into Sandy Bates’s apartment, Dorrie calls it pretty, and Sandy tells her it is not pretty at all, that pigeons are rats with wings. Sociologist Colin Jerolmack, who worked through decades of pigeon coverage in the New York Times and 51 other papers, found that almost every article from 1990 onwards engaged with that frame, including the few that were trying to be kind.

The comparison carried a health warning as well as an insult. Diseases associated with pigeon droppings are real, but New York City’s health department describes the risk as rare. People with compromised immune systems face the greatest risk, while routine cleaning of droppings from a windowsill does not pose a serious danger to most people. Large accumulations still require precautions. That is a long way from treating every pigeon as a public health menace.

The familiar street pigeon is a feral Columba livia, descended from domestic pigeons whose wild ancestor is the Rock Dove. They are the same species. The date of domestication is uncertain, but the relationship has lasted for thousands of years. People bred pigeons for food, messages and sport. Birds that escaped or were released founded the feral populations now found in cities around the world.

In 2014, Dragan Simic asked a question on this site in Feral Pigeons World Wide: are there any genetically clean populations of Columba livia livia left? He also argued that birders should record wild Rock Doves and feral pigeons separately. At the time, there was little genetic evidence to show where the wild lineage still survived.

In 2022, Will Smith and colleagues used DNA sequence data from 232 pigeons, including domestic breeds, feral birds and presumed Rock Doves from Britain and Ireland. Geography mattered. The Outer Hebridean Rock Doves showed negligible feral admixture, making them the least affected population in the study. Some populations in Orkney had interbred extensively with feral pigeons and may already have been lost as distinct lineages.

Hybridisation does not look like a conventional extinction. There is no last bird and no obvious date to put in a record book. Over generations, the rarer lineage becomes harder to distinguish from the more abundant one. In this case, the feral descendants of domesticated pigeons are interbreeding with the wild population from which domestic pigeons ultimately came.

Smith points to a practical problem. Rock Doves and feral pigeons have often been combined in local and national bird reports, which means that the trend of the rarer wild form can be hidden by the numbers of the feral one. The insult and the reporting problem have different histories, but both make it easy to look past the bird that is actually disappearing.

Outer Hebridean Rock Doves are still there, and the work on them is still going. Smith and Michal Jezierski have been running a long-term study of the islands’ birds since 2019, catching them at night in caves and derelict buildings, and have now ringed more than 1,300 individuals. Whether that population holds will be much easier to see if observers record the two forms separately, as Dragan suggested in 2014.

I have not become a pigeon enthusiast. The birds outside my window are loud, numerous and entirely unafraid of me. I do look at them differently now. The common city pigeon and the scarce wild Rock Dove belong to the same human-made story, but only one of them is common. For the Hebridean birds, that distinction needs to remain visible in the records.

Cover photo (Two pigeons sitting on a stone by a fast flowing river in summer) licensed from Adobe Stock by author