And why not? They deserve their time in the sun too! They’re not unattractive and, as a species, incredibly successful.

My grandfather used to race pigeons. I grew up in the UK and someone would pick them up and take them over to somewhere in Europe, where they were released, the time of the release being recorded. Somehow, they would make their way back to his house. He would take the ring from their leg, inset it into some kind of machine and record the time that they arrived. I don’t know if he got some kind of prize if his pigeons arrived first. Must have been something like that because from time to time, the pigeons would return, but instead of alighting in their coop they would instead land on the roof of the house. Of course, he couldn’t get to them there and they were wasting valuable time. He would get quite angry, shouting and screaming at them to get off the roof.

He was also quite ruthless. If a pigeon was not performing, it was in the pot. I was quite close to one of them and when I discovered that my friend was my dinner (or tea as we called it where I grew up in the north of England) I was distraught.

I also have pleasant memories of eating pigeon outdoors with my late wife on the banks of the Nile River in Egypt. I believe we were in a cafe called the “Cafe des Pigeons”. It was swarming with Egyptian cats that looked as if they had just stepped out of the hieroglyphics on the wall of a tomb. I couldn’t find it through Google, so it might no longer exist.

Taken with a Sony A6000 and 18-135mm f3.5-5.6 OSS