Dude, if Alfred Hitchcock had ever lived in India, The Birds would have been a very different movie.
I honestly do not understand where all of metropolitan India's pigeons are coming from. There must be at least ten pigeons for every man, woman and child in this town.
And pigeons are seriously weird animals. I just Googled "World's Dumbest Animal" to see if pigeons made the list (they probably don't) and apparently actual scientists have yet to decide what is the dumbest animal on earth using any concrete method. But plenty of Internet commenters seem to have opinions on this subject (one suggestion: dragons, because "they went extinct and that's the stupidest thing you can do.")
The other day I was sitting around with some expats at a party (by the way, remember those rumors of amazing expat parties you keep hearing? Okay, yeah, so this is how they actually go) and somehow we started talking about pigeons.
Specifically, what is up with pigeons? How is it that so many awesome species have gone extinct, and yet pigeons not only linger but thrive, like some kind of unmentionable rash?
Here are some of the really inexplicable things that pigeons do:
1. Live in air conditioning units. This is not a lie. Entire clans of pigeons will take up residence in the protruding portion of a window air conditioning unit. A window A/C unit has a volume of about 13 cubic feet (warning: I got this figure by eyeballing my window A/C unit, there were no measuring tapes involved) and the average pigeon has a volume of about 1.5 cubic feet (warning: I got this figure by Googling "average volume of a pigeon," discovering that nobody had every Googled this before, and then making it up) and yet somehow at least 50 pigeons roost in a single A/C unit. It must be like pigeon steerage in there.
I suspect that when one pigeon meets another, in pigeon language, they probably trace entire clan relationships back to which window A/C unit their great-great-grand-pigeons lived in. In pigeon romantic tragedies, the star-crossed lovers probably come from competing A/C units.
If you have a window A/C unit, chances are, you wake up most mornings to the sounds of a slowly crescendo-ing chorus of pigeon warbling and wailing. There will be rustling. Then random thumping. Then what sounds like a murder, then an opera sung without words. What are those pigeons doing in that A/C unit? God only knows, but it's clearly violent: every so often, my A/C will spit out a few random pigeon feathers along with cool air.
2. Stage confrontations. This may be a lie. Pigeons LOVE to fight each other. Particularly in groups. Every so often I'll wander into my apartment to find the floor littered with pigeon feathers and odd little claw-prints, like the loser of some pitched battle crawled off somewhere to die. Sometimes it's just feathers. One time, I found a pigeon feather in my bed. I really don't want to know how it got there.
3. Live in stove hoods. (Warning: if you really like animals, you probably don't want to read this next part.) Apparently pigeons also nest in stove hoods. A friend of mine learned this the hard way, when he started hearing pigeon noises coming from his stove hood. One day, in an attempt to scare the pigeons out, he turned the flame up really really high - like really high (now that I think about it, I'm not sure how he did this) - but you can see where this story is going. The flame reached the stove hood. There was scrambling. There were feathers. The next day it took 5 men to remove the remains of several flambe-d pigeons from the stove hood.
And lastly, here's an inexplicable thing that people do...
1. Not eat pigeons. Think about it. In a city where the official poverty line is Rs. 32 per day (which is less than a dollar) and many people can only afford to eat one meal, what does it say about the general nastiness of our pigeon population that nobody tries to eat the pigeons?
I honestly do not understand where all of metropolitan India's pigeons are coming from. There must be at least ten pigeons for every man, woman and child in this town.
And pigeons are seriously weird animals. I just Googled "World's Dumbest Animal" to see if pigeons made the list (they probably don't) and apparently actual scientists have yet to decide what is the dumbest animal on earth using any concrete method. But plenty of Internet commenters seem to have opinions on this subject (one suggestion: dragons, because "they went extinct and that's the stupidest thing you can do.")
The other day I was sitting around with some expats at a party (by the way, remember those rumors of amazing expat parties you keep hearing? Okay, yeah, so this is how they actually go) and somehow we started talking about pigeons.
Specifically, what is up with pigeons? How is it that so many awesome species have gone extinct, and yet pigeons not only linger but thrive, like some kind of unmentionable rash?
Here are some of the really inexplicable things that pigeons do:
1. Live in air conditioning units. This is not a lie. Entire clans of pigeons will take up residence in the protruding portion of a window air conditioning unit. A window A/C unit has a volume of about 13 cubic feet (warning: I got this figure by eyeballing my window A/C unit, there were no measuring tapes involved) and the average pigeon has a volume of about 1.5 cubic feet (warning: I got this figure by Googling "average volume of a pigeon," discovering that nobody had every Googled this before, and then making it up) and yet somehow at least 50 pigeons roost in a single A/C unit. It must be like pigeon steerage in there.
I suspect that when one pigeon meets another, in pigeon language, they probably trace entire clan relationships back to which window A/C unit their great-great-grand-pigeons lived in. In pigeon romantic tragedies, the star-crossed lovers probably come from competing A/C units.
If you have a window A/C unit, chances are, you wake up most mornings to the sounds of a slowly crescendo-ing chorus of pigeon warbling and wailing. There will be rustling. Then random thumping. Then what sounds like a murder, then an opera sung without words. What are those pigeons doing in that A/C unit? God only knows, but it's clearly violent: every so often, my A/C will spit out a few random pigeon feathers along with cool air.
2. Stage confrontations. This may be a lie. Pigeons LOVE to fight each other. Particularly in groups. Every so often I'll wander into my apartment to find the floor littered with pigeon feathers and odd little claw-prints, like the loser of some pitched battle crawled off somewhere to die. Sometimes it's just feathers. One time, I found a pigeon feather in my bed. I really don't want to know how it got there.
3. Live in stove hoods. (Warning: if you really like animals, you probably don't want to read this next part.) Apparently pigeons also nest in stove hoods. A friend of mine learned this the hard way, when he started hearing pigeon noises coming from his stove hood. One day, in an attempt to scare the pigeons out, he turned the flame up really really high - like really high (now that I think about it, I'm not sure how he did this) - but you can see where this story is going. The flame reached the stove hood. There was scrambling. There were feathers. The next day it took 5 men to remove the remains of several flambe-d pigeons from the stove hood.
And lastly, here's an inexplicable thing that people do...
1. Not eat pigeons. Think about it. In a city where the official poverty line is Rs. 32 per day (which is less than a dollar) and many people can only afford to eat one meal, what does it say about the general nastiness of our pigeon population that nobody tries to eat the pigeons?
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