WE URBANITES have a blind spot when it comes to pigeons. Sometimes they hardly seem to count as birds. Often dismissed as rats with wings, they are reviled as feral escapees from former domestication. How could anything as unnatural as today’s urban pigeons, so sullied by their contact with humanity, tell us anything worth knowing?
Yet ever since Charles Darwin, a few trailblazing investigators have recognised the urban pigeon for the natural wonder that it is. In Superdove, science writer Courtney Humphries tells the stories of these scientific mavericks and the enthusiasts who race, breed or befriend them. She…
