So I Was Told That Human Planet Had A Segment About Pigeons In The Cities Episode That I Might Be Interested

So I was told that Human Planet had a segment about pigeons in the Cities episode that I might be interested in and I was honestly so underwhelmed. I haven’t finished the episode so maybe there’s more pigeon stuff but I feel like all I saw was more Birds Of Prey Are The Only Cool And Acceptable Birds and pigeons are Trespassers In Our Urban World Who Shit On Everything And Are Useless On Top Of It. Which isn’t true and I’m so tired of this being framed as some horrible burden that humanity must face. Pigeons are the victims here, not us. 

Hate of pigeons didn’t start until the 20th Century. Before that was about 9,900 years of loving them. The rock pigeon was domesticated 10,000 years ago and not only that, we took them freaking everywhere. Pigeons were the first domesticated bird and they were an all-around animal even though they were later bred into more specialised varieties. They were small but had a high feed conversion rate, in other words it didn’t cost a whole lot of money or space to keep and they provided a steady and reliable source of protein as eggs or meat. They home, so you could take them with you and then release them from wherever you were and they’d pretty reliably make their way back. Pigeons are actually among the fastest flyers and they can home over some incredible distances (what fantastic navigators!). They were an incredibly important line of communication for multiple civilisations in human history. You know the first ever Olympics? Pigeons were delivering that news around the Known World at the time. Also, their ability to breed any time of year regardless of temperature or photoperiod? That was us, we did that to them, back when people who couldn’t afford fancier animals could keep a pair or two for meat/eggs. 

Rooftop pigeon keeping isn’t new, it’s been around for centuries and is/was important to a whole variety of cultures. Pigeons live with us in cities because we put them there, we made them into city birds. I get that there are problems with bird droppings and there’s implications for too-large flocks. By all means those are things we should look to control, but you don’t need to hate pigeons with every fibre of your being. You don’t need to despise them or brush them off as stupid (they have been intelligence tested extensively as laboratory animals because guess what other setting they’re pretty well-adapted to? LABORATORIES!) because they aren’t stupid. They’re soft intelligent creatures and I don’t have time to list everything I love about pigeons again. You don’t need to aggressively fight them or have a deep desire to kill them at all. It’s so unnecessary, especially if you realise that the majority of reasons pigeons are so ubiquitous is a direct result of human interference.

We haven’t always hated pigeons though, Darwin’s pigeon chapter in The Origin of Species took so much of the spotlight that publishers at the time wanted him to make the book ONLY about pigeons and to hell with the rest because Victorian’s were obsessed with pigeons (as much as I would enjoy a book solely on pigeons, it’s probably best that he didn’t listen).  My point is, for millenia, we loved pigeons. We loved them so much we took them everywhere with us and shaped them into a bird very well adapted for living alongside us.

It’s only been very recently that we decided we hated them, that we decided to blame them for ruining our cities. The language we use to describe pigeons is pretty awful. But it wasn’t always, and I wish we remembered that. I wish we would stop blaming them for being what we made them, what they are, and spent more time actually tackling the problems our cities face.  

I just have a lot of feelings about how complex and multidimensional hating pigeons actually is

our glorious party (one betrayed and broken good-hearted dragon fighter; one prideful lightning genasi sorcerer with amnesia; one shapeshifting liar sharing one body with multiple identities; all shaken not stirred) once encountered a demon lord. he managed to win two of us to his side,

and the one who was left - the liar - was positively shocked he's the only one doing what's right.

so he used the Wish spell to enslave Graz'zt (i mean, Tasha managed to do it!), and... well... a damaged disabled human boy named Graz'zt found himself adopted by our party's most unstable member.

the story doesn't end there though!

Paracelsus ( shapeshifting father of the year ) then travelled back in time and somehow convinced Graz'zt the Demon that Graz'zt the Human is his actual half-demon son.

And that, kids, is how I got my warlock powers

Oscar Wilde, De Profundis // @i-wrotethisforme // Jorge Louis Berges // @smokeinsilence //@viridianmasquerade //Jorge Louis Berges // @honeytuesday // Kaveh Akbar // F. Scott Fitzgerald // AKR //Olivie Blake, from “Alone With You in the Ether” // Kaveh Akbar, Pilgrimage

my beloved told me about this dragon ball franchise, his favourite characters & the moments he absolutely admired & the jokes & some beautiful YouTube analysis & crack videos and re-dubbing & how he was excited to see a movie and then just... didn't watch the anime with me. the AUDACITY

he's never refused to watch dragonball together, so everything's alright, but i still had to draw him a sexy ultra ego vegeta holding lord beerus as a burrito of destruction that he is, just so my bf's attention would be drawn to this scandalous matter

Turquoise inlaid bronze sword, China, Spring and Autumn Period (771-476 BC)

from Sotheby's

levitatin'