Pests or pets? It turns out pigeons have a long history of eating human food

Are pigeons domesticated? Or are they wild?

They are not pets, though they are sometimes treated that way, fed crumbs and spoken to, trained to expect kindness.

Pigeons do not live on the periphery of cities like seagulls or geese. They are right in it, sometimes literally indoors, and they never leave. They are urban wildlife but they are not wild. They do not migrate. They eat what they can find in a city. A city pigeon has no more business in the actual wilderness than a Yorkshire terrier. But in the city, even among cars and other hostilities, pigeons are unflappable. You can shoo them, but only just. They are at home.

So they are domesticated, but in a unique way for a bird.

A new research paper traces the earliest prehistorical origins of humanity’s relationship with the so-called winged rat. It turns out this close and constant relationship is much older than previously thought.

Stable isotope analysis of pigeon bones found at the Hala Sultan Tekke archeological site in Cyprus pushes back the earliest evidence of pigeon domestication by almost a full millennium, to 1400 BC.

By analyzing more than 183 bones from the genus Columbidae, 159 of which were identified as Columba livia, the scientific name for pigeons, researchers from the U.S. and the Netherlands showed that the levels of certain stable isotopes in their diet overlap “almost exactly” with the same measurements for contemporary humans.

That means the pigeons were eating the same food as the people. Moreover, they did not eat what wild birds might be expected to eat. The researchers conclude these pigeons of prehistoric Cyprus ate “a limited and consistent diet on par with the patterns seen in managed species.”

So, not quite fully domesticated, but eating human food as they live alongside humans, so not wild. This is the modern pigeon.

Today, pigeons are often a nuisance, and treated like pests. In Halifax, someone seems to be poisoning pigeons with laced corn. In Toronto, a pigeon contraception program using drugs delivered in feed stations to render birds temporarily infertile recently failed to bring down the pigeon population. In Brantford, Ont., local authorities had to explain to homeowners that a local racing pigeon club was not to blame for bird droppings in backyards, because pigeons don’t defecate while flying.

But in ancient Cyprus, the blossoming relationship between pigeons and people seemed to be a little smoother.

The results of the isotope analysis “suggest that these birds may have been semi-domesticated and may have held a symbolic/ritualistic role that challenges their common perception as mere urban dwellers,” reads the paper, published Thursday in the peer-reviewed British journal Antiquity.

These pigeons “likely lived in sustained close contact with humans, where they were managed and probably bred on site and consumed during ritual feasting.”

Now the site of an important Muslim mosque and mausoleum, Hala Sultan Tekke was occupied in the Late Bronze Age, the period of great material advancement in the eastern Mediterranean, just before the Bronze Age collapse in the 12th century BC, when societies from Mycenaean Greece to the Hittite Empire in what is now Turkey abruptly disintegrated.

“We knew that pigeons must have become domesticated somewhere in the Middle East or Eastern Mediterranean, based mostly on the written record from Egypt, but we had no idea when or how,” said study lead author Anderson Carter of the University of Groningen in a statement.

These pigeon bones discovered on Cyprus date to between 1650 and 1150 BC. It is only about a thousand years later that archeologists find the earliest “columbaria,” or dovecotes, built out of stone to house fully domesticated pigeons.

It is not clear whether the Cyprus pigeons were fully domesticated or just well on their way. But there are clues to how they were being used.

At the Hala Sultan Tekke site, pigeon bones were often found to be burned and buried together with other animal bones in ritual settings, both mammals and fish, suggesting they were eaten as part of large ceremonial feasts.

Contextual clues suggest this was as part of a wider symbolic tradition associated with fertility goddesses, precursors of what would later become the classical Greek cult of Aphrodite. As the study notes, “There are no visible cut or chop marks, but, for birds of this moderate size, butchery is not necessary for consumption.”

“One of the most exciting aspects was seeing people’s reactions to the research,” Anderson said. “People that previously ignored pigeons on the street suddenly realizing that this bird actually has a very interesting history. That’s the goal ultimately, to change how we interact with and think about this bird, and other animal species, and start realising that their story is also our story.”