Keeping Fancy Birds

Photo Provided by Bill Chaisson
This past Wednesday I emerged from eating breakfast at a New London restaurant and while I was waiting for my niece, I found myself looking up and around. I suppose I was reflexively looking for birds, but I could also have been reflexively inspecting the architecture of the building. Architecture is another of my fascinations. It is another avocation that is appealing to someone who likes to identify varieties of things and keep track of regional variations, give them names and wonder, why in the heck does that look like that?

The building that houses the restaurant is a typical New England construction that expanded on an as-needed basis to accommodate new and additional uses. The core of the building appears to have once been a stable. I say “stable” rather than barn because it is right on Main Street and is therefore likely to have been for horses that pulled carriages, not for cows. Under the peak of the gable there is a narrow ledge held up by two brackets in front of three arched holes cut into a broad fascia board surmounted by a simple ornamental lintel.

It was a dovecote, that is, a home for pigeons. Not wild or feral pigeons, but birds that were once kept by a person who bred them and cared for them, a pigeon fancier. I didn’t walk around the back of the old stable to see if there was another on the opposite gable. That might have told me whether this was a purely decorative feature, which is a decadent architectural tradition, or this was a real dovecote. Because it was immediately above a window, I suspect it was a working dovecote at one time; it seemed added on rather than part of the original design of the building.

Pigeon fancying is an undertaking that is over 5,000 years old and is practiced in cultures all over the world. All domestic pigeons are derived from a single wild species, Columba livia, the natural range of which extends from Scotland and Senegal in the west to Bangladesh and Mongolia in the east. Between 800 and 1,100 different varieties exist today, and they have been developed to serve a multitude of purposes and/or achieve particular exaggerated appearances. In the United States and the United Kingdom three main categories are recognized: sporting (or flying), fancy, and utility pigeons. The first two categories are raised primarily for competition and the last for consumption.

Pigeon fancying has been more or less democratic through the ages and in different places. In modern Europe and the United States, it is certainly practiced by all classes of people, as can be ascertained by depictions of famous fanciers in fiction and as mentioned in biographies. In the film On the Waterfront, the

protagonist Terry Malloy (played by Marlon Brando) is a working-class resident of Red Hook in Brooklyn, where many of the men were dock workers. Screenwriter Budd Schulman (a Californian patrician who attended Dartmouth) made Terry—a failed prize fighter being drawn into a life of crime—a pigeon fancier and the film includes a scene of him showing this ostensibly tender side of himself to his love interest, Edie Doyle (Eva Marie Saint).

At the other end of the social spectrum, Charles Darwin, a gentleman-scientist who never really needed to work a day in his life, raised pigeons in order to study variation within a species. In his canonical Origin of Species, Darwin explores artificial selection as practiced in various forms of animal husbandry, including pigeon keeping, as a way of beginning to explain natural selection. He was using a tradition that was widely known, practiced and accepted in order to introduce a very new and controversial idea.

The structure that I spotted in New London was designed to allow the kept pigeons to fly free. Not all fanciers allow their animals to fly freely, but in order to remain healthy, pigeons must fly and so the fanciers construct a so-called “flypen” for them.

Dovecotes (also dovecot, or doocot in Scotland, or culverhouse in England, or pigeonaire in France, or columbarium elsewhere) take many forms all over the world and throughout history. In the Middle East, the earliest structures are massive masonry buildings where the droppings were collected for use as fertilizer. It was the Romans who introduced pigeon keeping to most of Europe. There are no records of the practice in Gaul or the British islands before the arrival of the Romans.

In medieval Europe, pigeon keeping, like falconry, was the exclusive province of the aristocracy. Consequently, the surviving dovecotes of that era are rather grand. The Spanish word for pigeon is paloma (which name Pablo Picasso gave his daughter) and a dovecote is called a palomar. The Palomar Observatory near San Diego is on Mount Palomar, so-named because it was home to band-tailed pigeons (Patagioenas fasciata). These older dovecotes were often free-standing structures and took on the architectural style of their time and place, but always included several functional features.

The entrances for the pigeons are called boulins and they must have a small ledge in front of them for the birds to land on before they enter. The boulins are placed high on the structure, which is otherwise either featureless or shaped in such a way as to discourage predators from reaching the boulins.

Inside is mostly empty, in order for the pigeons to fly freely and for the keeper to move about. There are nest boxes lining the walls and the interior is kept dark to encourage nesting. There should be more perches than pigeons because the birds are territorial about perching places.

Historically, dovecotes were used to raise utility pigeons, that is, to eat them. It is said that the introduction of root vegetables to Great Britain in the 18th century made dovecotes obsolete because people no longer needed that source of nutrition in the winter.