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    Aloft: A Meditation on Pigeons & Pigeon-Flying
    Aloft: A Meditation on Pigeons & Pigeon-Flying
    Aloft: A Meditation on Pigeons & Pigeon-Flying
    Ebook85 pages1 hour

    Aloft: A Meditation on Pigeons & Pigeon-Flying

    By Stephen Bodio and Sy Montgomery

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    About this ebook

    The humble pigeon is anything but common” to those who know the true nature of these birds. This bird is so enamored by some that, for over six thousand years, people have devoted themselves to the art of pigeon flying and pigeon breeding. Across the world, from the cities of America to China, enthusiasts have lovingly nurtured their flocks, creating thousands of breeds from small to large, and admired their beauty in every shape and size: pigeons with crests and frills, those who fly and those who can’t.

    Stephen Bodio draws readers in with resounding prose and a captivating portrayal of one of the most overlooked birds in the world. Aloft stunningly brings to light the incredible feats accomplished by homing pigeons, capable of flying thousands of miles back home, often twenty-four hours at a time, as well as the innate natural beauty and grace that each breed has in its own right.

    Aloft reveals fascinating insight that will ensure no one will look upon the common pigeon” the same way again.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSkyhorse
    Release dateAug 5, 2014
    ISBN9781629140551
    Aloft: A Meditation on Pigeons & Pigeon-Flying

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      Book preview

      Aloft - Stephen Bodio

      INTRODUCTION

      Y OU’RE ABOUT TO READ A MEMOIR disguised as natural history, an account of sport told by an artist, a book brimming with science that’s really a love story.

      For Stephen Bodio, pigeons have given him everything.

      Too many of us dismiss Columba livia = living bus exhaust, rats with wings. They are so common on city streets and telephone wires we see right through them. Yet for six thousand years, humans have taken delight in the species’ athleticism, acrobatics, resilience, and startling beauty.

      Pigeons have lived among humans ever since we began to grow grain, and to further induce them to stay near us, for millennia, we have built them pigeon houses, known as dovecotes, so we could use them to carry our messages, nourish our bodies, fertilize our fields, race them for sport, and simply admire them.

      For Stephen, though, pigeons offered even more. Pigeons were his muse. At age eight, he was already in love with animals, but his dad’s first pair of saddle-marked muffed tumblers—gorgeous pigeons with whitish beaks and high foreheads, white wings and leg muffs, feathers glistening with iridescent purples and greens—ignited a passion that would blaze through his entire, epic, wild life. With pigeons, for the first time, Stephen fell madly in love, and it is this same love than has fueled the bottomless curiosity, unceasing commitment, and jawdropping observations that have characterized his every endeavor he has undertaken since, from hunting with hawks and coursing dogs to creating some of the most incandescent writing about nature and culture that has graced American literature in the past century.

      For Stephen, pigeons opened the world. They were his sky-probes. Pigeons made the air visible. They reveal the magnetism of the Earth, the scent of the breeze, the slant of ultra-violet light, the invisible currents these birds navigate along a gauntlet of hidden hazards in the sky: owls, hawks, winds, rain, guns. Pigeons were his introduction to genetics, a cornerstone of biology. More than 800 breeds exist; pigeons are rivaled only by dogs and perhaps goldfish in the plethora of forms they can assume. Pigeons were (and are) his living link to some of humanity’s most ancient and honorable lifeways, to our partnership with other species, connecting him with ancient Egyptians who awaited messages carried by pigeons to tell them whether the life-giving flood waters had returned along the Nile, and to Kublai Khan, who used a pigeon post to cover one sixth of the globe.

      And pigeons opened to him a sport like no other: an invisible race with a starting line only one person sees, dozens of different finish lines, and whose excitement provokes a desire to win, he writes, that feels as real as hunger.

      This revealing book is his dramatic and intense account of the passion and competition, adventure and romance of a creature all of us see but few of us know. It will ignite your own sense of wonder in a way that will surprise and delight you. Rats with wings? No—they are walking, strutting, flying flowers as he puts it, living out mysterious lives filled with danger and excitement, bound by steely fidelity, gifted with senses of which mere humans can only dream. You will never look at pigeons the same again.

      —Sy Montgomery

      April, 2014

      CHAPTER 1

      I N THE EARLY MORNING , when I fly my birds, the local wildlife has been up for hours. Towhees flirt up from the ground to the old fence and the sweet whistles of house finches rain down from above. There’s a quail on a fence post and a mocker skulking away, his wings whirling like one of those mechanical windmill birds. From the pigeon loft comes the rhythmic clapping of a cock’s wings as he pursues a hen to the floor, followed by his rolling courting call. I can see his stifftailed inflated strut before I even open the doors.

      I stop to scan the sky for hawks. It is a time of pastel colors. The sun rises here long before it emerges from behind the shoulders of the Magdalena Mountains, so that it is light but without glare for at least an hour. On this winter morning there are lead-colored clouds to the west and a stiff breeze. These may be good signs. Nothing deters a falcon. But the juvenile Cooper’s hawks and sharpshins that hang around the nearby town in winter are another matter. They live off the bounty of the village, eating starlings and baby fighting chickens and sparrows. Forest birds, they seem to regard the town, with its diverse plantings and narrow alleys, as an artificial woods. On still days they will venture out, sneaking from tree to tree, and I have had one dash from my isolated Siberian elm to bear away a pigeon. But their long tails and short wings—evolved to twist through tangles—are less than handy in the wind, and they stay in town.

      So: over to the loft, first coffee still in hand, to throw down the outside bird door. The first two fliers hurtle through the opening, barely missing me, and flap away down wind, banging their wings like a newly mated pair. In a moment they are climbing, at first dark against the sky, then with white wingtips flashing against the blue Magdalenas. Five, six more shoot out over my shoulder, climbing after them, then all the rest in five or six coordinated bunches. Three late risers veer around me as I go to close the door. By the time I climb the ladder to my roof they are all out of sight. I turn, and turn again—and there they are, coming straight toward me from town, shooting overhead, down the wind, with a multiplied sigh of wings. They are much higher than I thought they would be, and still climbing.

      As they pass again in front of the rough flank of the Magdalenas, I can see individual Catalonian tumblers falling, sideslipping, twirling, flaring in corkscrew patterns. Spanish pouters gobble air like animated balloons. Homers just stroke on forward. Yet somehow the diverse flock, flashing white and gray and brown, maintains its coherence. It is more like some ghost or animated cloud than a group of individual organisms. I can imagine a little of what it sees with its multiple eyes—each of which has a much wider field, forward and back, up

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