The New York Pigeon
The New York Pigeon

Author: Andrew Garn

Publisher: powerHouse Books

Published: 2024-06-11

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781648230745

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Humans have always bred, farmed, raced, and lived alongside pigeons. Some of us shoo them away and others care for them as the city’s most famous wildlife. The New York Pigeon, now in its second edition with spectacular new images, is a one-of-a-kind, intimate study of this worldwide neighbor. The New York Pigeon reveals the unexpected beauty of the omnipresent pigeon as if Vogue devoted its pages to birds, not fashion models. In spite of pigeons’ ubiquity in New York and other cities, we never really see them closely and know very little about their function in the urban ecosystem. This book brings to light the intriguing history, behavior, and splendor of a bird so often overlooked. While The New York Pigeon is primarily a photography book, it also tells the five-thousand-year story of the feral pigeon. Why are pigeons so successful in cities and not in the countryside? Why do they have such diverse plumage? How have pigeons adapted to survive on almost any food? Why are pigeons able to fly up to 500 miles per day but rarely do? How did Harvard psychologist B.F. Skinner teach pigeons to do complicated tasks, from tracking missile targets to recognizing individual human faces? Why can pigeons see in the ultraviolet light spectrum, and why is half of their brain used for visual perception? The second edition of The New York Pigeon, with its fresh portraiture and new essay from Catherine Quayle of the Wild Bird Fund, presents dramatic, hyper-real studio portraits capturing the personalities, expressiveness, glorious feather iridescence, and deeply hued eyes of the New York pigeon.

Homing
Homing

Author: Jon Day

Publisher: John Murray

Published: 2019-06-13

Total Pages: 272

ISBN-13: 147363539X

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A SPECTATOR BOOK OF THE YEAR Longlisted for the William Hill Sports Book of the Year 'Rich and joyous ...The book's quiet optimism about our ability to change, and to learn to love small things passionately, will stay with me for a long time' Helen Macdonald 'Big-hearted and quietly gripping' Guardian 'I love Jon Day's writing and his birds. A marvellous, soaring account' Olivia Laing '[A] beautiful book about unbeautiful birds' Observer 'This is nature writing at its best' Financial Times 'Awash with historical and literary detail, and moving moments ... Wonderful' Telegraph 'Every page of this beautifully written book brought me pleasure' Charlotte Higgins 'A vivid evocation of a remarkable species and a rich working-class tradition. It's also a charming defence of a much-maligned bird, which will make any reader look at our cooing, waddling, junk-food-loving feathered friends very differently in future' Daily Mail 'Endlessly interesting and dazzlingly erudite, this wonderful book will make a home for itself in your heart' Prospect As a boy, Jon Day was fascinated by pigeons, which he used to rescue from the streets of London. Twenty years later he moved away from the city centre to the suburbs to start a family. But in moving house, he began to lose a sense of what it meant to feel at home. Returning to his childhood obsession with the birds, he built a coop in his garden and joined a local pigeon racing club. Over the next few years, as he made a home with his young family in Leyton, he learned to train and race his pigeons, hoping that they might teach him to feel homed. Having lived closely with humans for tens of thousands of years, pigeons have become powerful symbols of peace and domesticity. But they are also much-maligned, and nowadays most people think of these birds, if they do so at all, as vermin. A book about the overlooked beauty of this species, and about what it means to dwell, Homing delves into the curious world of pigeon fancying, explores the scientific mysteries of animal homing, and traces the cultural, political and philosophical meanings of home. It is a book about the making of home and making for home: a book about why we return.

The Global Pigeon
The Global Pigeon

Author: Colin Jerolmack

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2013-03-20

Total Pages: 293

ISBN-13: 022600189X

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The pigeon is the quintessential city bird. Domesticated thousands of years ago as a messenger and a source of food, its presence on our sidewalks is so common that people consider the bird a nuisance—if they notice it at all. Yet pigeons are also kept for pleasure, sport, and profit by people all over the world, from the “pigeon wars” waged by breeding enthusiasts in the skies over Brooklyn to the Million Dollar Pigeon Race held every year in South Africa. Drawing on more than three years of fieldwork across three continents, Colin Jerolmack traces our complex and often contradictory relationship with these versatile animals in public spaces such as Venice’s Piazza San Marco and London’s Trafalgar Square and in working-class and immigrant communities of pigeon breeders in New York and Berlin. By exploring what he calls “the social experience of animals,” Jerolmack shows how our interactions with pigeons offer surprising insights into city life, community, culture, and politics. Theoretically understated and accessible to interested readers of all stripes, The Global Pigeon is one of the best and most original ethnographies to be published in decades.