About The Coo Crew

The Coo Crew have come about following a passion for Pigeons and Doves and a desire to educate the world that these precious birds are not at all like their common reputation.

It was the satirist Tom Lehrer who started the rot setting in with the reputation, in 1959 with his song Poisoning Pigeons in the Park, which explained that it takes only a smidgen of strychnine and “it’s not against any religion to want to dispose of a pigeon”.

However, Tom is wrong. Many religions, including Muslim, Hindu and Sikh, love and feed pigeons for religious reasons. Many older Sikhs feed pigeons ceremoniously to honour the high priest and warrior Guru Gobind Singh who was a known friend of the pigeon (or rock dove).

I'm also fairly sure Buddhists are not likely to agree with Tom's blanket assumption.

However, Woody Allen delivered the killing blow in his 1980 film Stardust Memories, when he referred to feral pigeons as “rats with wings”. Whilst it was not a name he made up himself, since it had first appeared in 1966 in an article in The New York Times, Allen’s film reached a much wider audience than that article ever did and the results were far more damaging.

Ever since, pigeons have become one of the "Disgusting Three" - they now share a bad reputation along with North American grey squirrels (‘tree rats’) and rats themselves. Their fall from grace was sealed and took just a couple of decades for people to hate them on sight, without even knowing anything about them or where their unfair nickname originated from.

When someone pictures a Dove, the common assumption is a beautiful white bird, as mentioned in the Bible, which was the bird that bought good news in the floods, by returning to Noah with the olive branch. However, when you say Pigeon, people immediately picture a drab-looking grey bird which is disease-ridden, smelly and messy, that hangs around in cities and town centres. A lot of people do not realise that they are one and the same.

Pigeons are despised for no reason other than public ignorance. They are intelligent birds that have saved countless lives historically and have been a domesticated companion to humans for hundreds of years, but today their heritage is long forgotten. Pigeons were domesticated by humans and like other animals humans own, many become abandoned or homeless, so they naturally gravitate and congregate in places where their beloved humans are present, only in turn we treat them like vermin, instead of with care, love, and respect they crave and rightfully deserve.

Until agricultural advances quite recently, a dovecote, rabbit warren and carp pond were the three essentials to provide fresh meat throughout the year in European countries.

In addition to food, pigeons produced valuable guano which was so rich in nutrients that one bucket full was worth 10 times the same amount from any other species of animal.

Darwin (possibly the biggest Pigeon Fancier we have ever known) had a love of pigeons - much of the first chapter of On The Origin of Species is devoted to pigeons, where he describes the many breeds that can be created artificially with selective breeding.

In November 1855, Charles Darwin sent a letter to his great friend the geologist Charles Lyell. Darwin wrote: “I will show you my pigeons! Which are the greatest treat, in my opinion, that can be offered to a human being.”

We have also long forgotten that pigeons have also played a huge role in our advances in medicine. Prolactin is the hormone responsible for milk production in mammals, and it was first isolated in 1933 in pigeons as it is the same hormone that causes male and female pigeon parents to secrete crop milk to feed their young.

Many websites list the diseases recorded in feral pigeons and make it sound very scary when they start listing various things such as E Coli. But they don't mention the figures and facts that many more diseases are known to be found, carried and transmitted in people and also many more traditional pets such as dogs and cats.

All animals will carry diseases and it only becomes an issue if they can be transferred to humans (zoonotic), but there is very little evidence of this happening with pigeons. Domestic pigeons often come into contact with feral pigeons and stay perfectly healthy, so pigeons simply do not pose a significant health risk to humans - It’s really a non-issue, yet it still rages on as an outdated myth that simply will not die.

Even when pigeons were still an important source of meat in the 1800s, they became desirable for sport and large numbers of them were being stolen to supply the newly discovered and therefore fashionable pigeon shooting. These poor birds became live targets in competitions.

In the early 1940s, the American Signal Pigeon Corps consisted of 3,150 soldiers and 54,000 Pigeons. Some 90 per cent of the messages sent via Pigeon got through, even when many of the birds were fatally wounded and would later succumb to their injuries - they would still fight to get back with their important and human live saving messages. Those brave birds flew through gunfire, explosions and gas to save thousands of troops' lives – of 54 Dickin Medals (the animal’s VC) awarded in World War II, 32 went to pigeons.

And the list of ways that Pigeons have benefitted us goes on and on. The humble pigeon has contributed to civilisation in more ways than any other species of bird. So why have they become such social pariahs? Who did they upset?

We hear that pigeons are a real nuisance, but what exactly are these massive problems they are supposed to cause? The standard gripe we hear is that there are too many of them and therefore they need to be controlled. Of course, no one actually states that is an acceptable number of feral pigeons since many ignorant people seem to consider that any number greater than zero is too many.

There have been a handful of population estimates carried out, including one in Sheffield where it turned out there were 12k feral pigeons in the city with 584k people. That's barely 1 pigeon for every 48 people.

Of course, we also label them as dirty because they foul on statues and buildings. It's funny how humans find pigeon droppings more offensive than our own species dropping cigarette ends, chewing gum, litter, dropping food, dog faeces and (sometimes offensive) graffiti everywhere.

As part of my mission, I intend to spread the word about Pigeons and how wonderful they are by educating the world about their fantastic abilities, with a mix of both educational and entertaining videos.

The birds you see on the Coo Crew social media channels are all named and loved dearly - one big feathery family. Many of them have been raised here and as such their personalities are known to me and each bird is unique.

My long-term goal is to provide release birds for local events as well as interact with people who want to address a phobia of birds, as these gentle sky puppies are a delight to interact with and have already helped friends and neighbours learn to be less afraid of birds.

If you haven't already, please follow my links to my social media channels to see the Crew in action.