A £150 fine. Plans for a cull. And volunteers checking on the birds in Central Station. What should we be doing with the pigeons in public spaces, asks Herald columnist Mark Smith

One of the stories you may have missed amid the rubble and the flames and the trains cancelled until God-knows-when is the story of the volunteers who went to Central Station after the fire to check on its less itinerant population, the ones who don’t need tickets. What they found, I’m pleased to say, is that there were no reports of injuries or deaths. The birds are okay. Glasgow’s pigeons live to peck another day.

Some of you may think this is trivial stuff compared to the destruction of the Union Street building and the millions it’s going to cost to put up something, anything, in its place, and the big question about whether Glasgow is properly looking after its built heritage (it isn’t). Some of you may also be slightly disgusted by any sort of concern for the pigeons; you may think there’s a hierarchy of animals, with your cat or dog at the top probably, and rats and mice and pigeons near the bottom. In other words, you may not care about Central Station’s pigeons one way or the other.

You would not be alone in your attitude. I’ve interviewed quite a few pigeon experts and keepers over the years and all of them have told me how public attitudes to the birds have changed, for the worse. There was a time when pigeon-keeping was one of the most popular past-times in the country, with a quarter of a million people doing it; now it would be 40,000 if you’re lucky. Certain types of people (you know who they are) have also become overly obsessed with cleanliness and tidiness and see animals and birds as the enemy of those two things. One man I spoke to who keeps pigeons summed it up. “There’s an anti-pigeon mood,” he said. “The phrase ‘flying rats’ stuck.”

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You see the attitude creeping into public policy as well. A young woman called Sam Elkin was sitting in Manchester eating a sandwich the other day and broke a bit off to give to a pigeon. Within seconds, a council enforcement officer had flapped over to her and issued her with a £150 fine on the grounds that “littering of this type attracts vermin” (note the use of the v-word there). Meanwhile, in London, in a gated community called The Academy, the managers were planning to shoot the local pigeons today until the campaign group Protect The Wild got to hear of it; the cull has now been postponed while ‘alternative solutions’ are explored, but it all amounts to the same thing really: pigeons are dirty, a problem, get rid of them.

However, the most striking thing about the pigeons-are-dirty school of thought is that it is, in fact, entirely the wrong way round, and the story of the Central Station pigeons is a good example. The main reason the volunteers were out at the station the other day was to check on the welfare of the birds that live there, but the main job of the volunteers, who call themselves Happy Feet, is to treat pigeons for stringfoot, the unpleasant and disabling condition in which the birds’ claws become entangled in human litter, such as string and thread and floss and other bits of litter. In other words, it’s not humans suffering because of the dirtiness of pigeons, it’s pigeons suffering because of the dirtiness of humans, and boy are we dirty.

Fortunately, groups like Happy Feet are out there doing their bit to help, but the bigger hope is we can rehabilitate pigeons and get people to appreciate how remarkable they really are. Their homing instinct for example: it’s extraordinary, but no one really knows how it works. There are various theories, such as they use their sense of smell or can detect the earth’s magnetic field, but Jon Day, who wrote a brilliant book on pigeons called Homing, said the best we can assume is that it’s essentially a suite of different and fairly mysterious navigational senses that humans do not possess. So, in this sense at least, pigeons are cleverer than humans, the humans staring at their sat-navs and chucking litter on the ground.

A firefighter at the closed Central Station

This is not to say there can never be issues with pigeons, of course there can. A pigeon fancier showed me round her loft in Wishaw and said that any animal can be a nuisance if they’re in the “wrong” place, which is true but not the same as the blanket v-word. She put one of her birds into my hands and it sat there, peacefully, silently, and I won’t forget it: the long, light bones in the wings, super-strong like girders, the movement of the tiny heart that powers its flights, and the soft pecks at my fingers, a gentle protest at the indignity of being constrained by a human. Pigeons are capable of accelerating from 0-60 miles per hour in under two seconds; they are deserving of wonder, not hate.

This will not be enough for some people I know, but I would urge such people to consider a few things. Such as: what is the difference between the robins and chaffinches we spend millions of pounds to feed and the pigeons and seagulls we spend millions of pounds to deter or kill? And if it’s pigeons’ ubiquity you object to, the fact that they’re round your feet when you’re eating a sandwich, or they’re in the ‘wrong’ place, or there are too many of them, consider the passenger pigeon. Until the 19th century, you could see flocks of up to a million in the US, but within a couple of decades they were wiped out by hunting. Message: don’t take the constants for granted because they might not be constants.

Where we go from here I’m not sure, but I’m worried. There’s the council official fining a woman £150 for feeding a pigeon and there’s the management company planning to shoot the pigeons on a housing estate. At the same time, the small army of people who had pigeon lofts across the country, the birds’ protectors and proponents, is dwindling. And the slur has stuck for some people: flying rats.

But consider this. One of the reasons pigeons have been so successful in cities, according to the writer Jon Day, is that they’ve adapted and thrived and see our homes as their homes, which means acknowledging that other creatures are going to live alongside us and adapting to the fact. Humans may be the ones that build the cities, and even burn parts of them down again, but cities are not, and will never be, exclusively human places. Amid the rubble and the flames and the trains cancelled until God-knows-when, the pigeons make Glasgow better. Here, have my sandwich.

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