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| Superdove: How the Pigeon Took Manhattan ... And the World | 
 enlarge | Author: Courtney Humphries
Publisher: Collins
Category: Book
List Price: $24.95
Buy New: $12.47
You Save: $12.48 (50%)
Buy New/Used from $10.67
Avg. Customer Rating:  (7 reviews)
Sales Rank: 50006
Languages: English (Original Language), English (Unknown), English (Published)
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 208
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.9
Dimensions (in): 21.3 x 14.7 x 0.7
ISBN: 0061259160
Dewey Decimal Number: 598.65
EAN: 9780061259166
ASIN: 0061259160
Publication Date: August 1, 2008
Release Date: August 12, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
Why do we see pigeons as lowly urban pests and how did they become such common city dwellers? Courtney Humphries traces the natural history of the pigeon, recounting how these shy birds that once made their homes on the sparse cliffs of sea coasts came to dominate our urban public spaces. While detailing this evolution, Humphries introduces us to synanthropy: The concept that animals can become dependent on humans without ceasing to be wild; they can adapt to the cityscape as if it were a field or a forest. Superdove simultaneously explores the pigeon's cultural transformation, from its life in the dovecotes of ancient Egypt to its service in the trenches of World War I, to its feats within the pigeon-racing societies of today. While the dove is traditionally recognized as a symbol of peace, the pigeon has long inspired a different sort of fetishistic devotion from breeders, eaters, and artists?and from those who recognized and exploited the pigeon's astounding abilities. Because of their fecundity, pigeons were symbols of fertility associated with Aphrodite, while their keen ability to find their way home made them ideal messengers and even pilots. Their usefulness largely forgotten, today's pigeons have become as ubiquitous and reviled as rats. But Superdove reveals something more surprising: By using pigeons for our own purposes, we humans have changed their evolution. And in doing so, we have helped make pigeons the ideal city dwellers they are today. In the tradition of Rats, the book that made its namesake rodents famous, Superdove is the fascinating story of the pigeon's journey from the wild to the city?the home they'll never leave.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 2 more reviews...
 Superdove October 8, 2008
I approached this book with the mindset that a pigeon is a "rat with wings." However, through Courtney Humphries' careful and broad research, my mind made a paradigm shift. I was fascinated that Charles Darwin used pigeons for research animals. I was also fascinated by Humphries' discussion of domestication of animals. It might be not that man domesticated pigeons (and many animals) but that they just moved in with our long ago ancestors.
I was especially impressed by author's annotated bibliography at the end of the book. I did keep seeking an analysis of the criticism of urban pigeons as the carriers of many diseases other than the fact that there are often just so many of them that they leave considerable fecal waste.
 Pigeons from all angles September 17, 2008
"Superdove", a creative book title by Courtney Humphries, is a fascinating if not overly-comprehensive look at "Columba livia", our most ubiquitous avian neighbor. Destined to be loved or loathed, Humphries takes us on a pigeon journey from Boston, across parts of America to Sardinia, in the Mediterranean. What we can see about these adaptable birds is only part of the picture. The author helps to fill in the rest.
Humphries captures pigeons in several aspects of daily life...not only what they eat and how they nest, but how important pigeons have been in compatibility with humans. Indeed, this is one of the main thrusts of the book. We live side by side with them, but what do we really know about them? There is a good chapter on racing pigeons, as well as others on how they interact with each other, where they tend to congregate and descriptions about their physical aspects. That pigeons are not very smart belies their ability to learn tasks at an astounding depth. Yet the one chapter that was most revealing was the one on homing. Attempts to defy and deny a pigeon's ability to find "home" run into problems...they have instincts that are nothing less than awesome.
"Superdove" is presented in a crisp, narrative style that's easy to read and I highly recommend it. It may not leave you liking the species any more than you had before, but Courtney Humphries has done a good job at educating us more than deeply than we had known.
Differing Aspects of a Unique Bird September 16, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
In _Stardust Memories_ of 1980, Woody Allen memorably called pigeons "rats with wings", summarizing how many urban dwellers think of them. Every city has pigeons, and this is just as much because of human nature as pigeon nature. In _Superdove: How the Pigeon Took Manhattan... and the World_ (Smithsonian Books), Courtney Humphries has presented a comprehensive look at this common bird (some would, of course, say common pest), but unlike a typical ornithological evaluation, this has to take in not just the natural history and evolution of the bird, but also the geography, history, and culture of the humans who have invited it to live in cities and indeed have shaped it to be able to do so. It's not the sort of bird you'd expect to see in, for instance, a special on the Nature Channel. "The pigeon is not the smartest bird, Humphries says, "nor the fastest, nor the prettiest, and it is certainly not the rarest. But it is capable of so much. More specialized birds might illustrate the limits of evolution, but pigeons show us its breadth." Pigeons show a widespread competence, rather than exploiting specialized expertise, and their interactions with us show a lot about human nature.
Pigeons are also called rock doves (and have recently been officially denominated "rock pigeons"), and indeed there is essentially no species difference between a dove and a pigeon. There are so many forms of pigeon because they were domesticated around five thousand years ago, probably the first domesticated birds. The birds were kept as a food source in dovecotes, and so began their long history of exploiting a niche in between full domestication and life in the wild. Pigeons also were used as messengers, and the capacity of pigeons to return to their homes has been the subject of biological investigation for decades; it seems that they can use sun position, smells, and visual cues, as well as being able to sense magnetic forces. The other way people use pigeons is for show. Careful breeding has developed birds that look vastly different from one another in color, posture, neck or tail feathers, and more. Pigeons were one of the many subjects Darwin pushed himself to find out about. Everyone knows that Darwin's finches from Galapagos are an important illustration of evolution, but not everyone realizes that pigeons played an even more important role. Darwin devoted the first chapter of the _Origin_ to pigeons because he saw that what human pigeon fanciers were doing with relative speed to their generations of pigeons, nature had done slowly with all animals and plants. It was a wonderful metaphor, easy to understand and vivid.
Humphries is a gifted writer, documenting with zest and humor her visits with world-wide experts on different aspects of this multifaceted bird, including ornithologists who are inspired by studying a bird that has changed so much through its long association with humans and other ornithologists who say such study is useless because the bird is so unnatural. She knows what to do about cities overpopulated with the birds, or at least she has talked to experts who have had success at reducing their cities' pigeon population. Every city is different, but, for instance, when Basel, Switzerland, realized that its pigeons were getting almost all their food from a small number of people who liked feeding them, it took action, not directly against the pigeons or against their feeders, but against the damage such feeders might do. "Feeding pigeons is animal cruelty," went out the message, enforcing the idea that unnatural feeding was swelling the population to unnatural limits. It worked; the pigeon population dropped from 24,000 to 8,000. _Superdove_ is also significant as a documentation of Humphries's own transformation from someone who took the birds for granted, but gradually found that they formed a huge world of history and research. It was generous of her to let us join her on the trip.
answers a lot of questions September 15, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
I've always thought pigeons were pretty amazing; as the author points out, they are "able to make a natural habitat out of areas that seem hostile to animal life" and thus "bring a bit of nature back into cities." This book answers a variety of questions, including:
1 . Where do pigeons come from, anyway? They are descendants of rock doves that nested in the cliffs of southern Europe and the Middle East. Eventually, pigeons were domesticated by being lured into dovecotes, essentially being given free food and shelter, and being used for message-sending due to their homing instinct (that is, their instinct to come home). Today's urban pigeons are feral rather than wild- that is, they are descendants of these domesticated pigeons.
2. Why are pigeons so comfortable in cities? First, habitat. The windows, porches and ledges of cities are similar (in a pigeon's eyes) to their native cliffs. Second, food. Humans tend to eat (and throw away) a lot of grain-based food- by coincidence the perfect pigeon diet. Third, because urban pigeons are descendants of domesticated ones, they have been bred to be less skittish around humans than some wild birds.
3. Why don't we eat more pigeons? Although pigeons breed rapidly enough to survive (and occasionally be eaten though usually as "squab") they don't breed nearly as rapidly as chickens. A hen can lay 200 eggs a year; pigeons are much less productive and waste valuable egg-laying time nurturing their young, since pigeon young are much more dependent on their parents than chicks. Thus, a farmer simply cannot churn out as many pigeons as chickens.
4. How smart are pigeons? In some ways, not so much. They have small brains, and don't solve puzzles or use tools. On the other hand, a well-trained pigeon can recall hundreds or thousands of images for years, and pigeons can even be trained to do assembly-line pecking due to their high tolerance for boredom.
5. Why might a city rationally want to discourage humans feeding pigeons? The issue (at least in cities where people have thought intelligently about the issue,) is less disease than overpopulation. Some scientists worry that if humans feed pigeons too much, it becomes easier for pigeons to breed, thus causing overpopulation and maybe a mass die-off. (I'm not sure whether this argument really makes sense, and I didn't get the impression that the author was trying to independently evaluate it herself).
 Woody Allen Had It Right Years Ago! September 3, 2008
1 out of 8 found this review helpful
Superdove is an objective look at pigeons - their history and evolution. However, it is unable to get me past Woody Allen's observation about pigeons - "rats with wings" - they're just plain filthy!
Humphries tells us that pigeons never existed in North America before Europeans brought them - the first noted observation was in 1606 at Nova Scotia when a French captain released those he had brought, and they were promptly attacked by local eagles. (Too bad the eagles didn't finish the story then.) They were brought here to serve as food, but eventually chickens took over the market because they were cheaper to raise. (Growing Muslim and Asian demand for squabs may bring pigeon-raising for food back.)
Originally pigeons lived only on the sides of cliffs. Thus, how did they become urban pests? Millenia ago those in the Middle East built structures that made lovely substitutes for cliffs; better yet, these "cliffs" had few resident falcons. Since then architecture has evolved from luring pigeons to stay around to keeping them off buildings.
For a time pigeons were also valued as a source of fertilizer and a gunpowder ingredient. Passenger pigeons once accounted for 25-40% of U.S. birds; however, large-scale hunting (slaughter) made them extinct by 1900.
Darwin began his study of evolution via a small number of pigeons kept in his English back yard.
"Superdove" then goes on to provide a short summary of the training of homing pigeons, and unsuccessfully attempts to explain how they accomplish this feat. (It's not the author's fault - findings are contradictory.)
Finally, she reminds us that B.F. Skinner saw the value of pigeons as experimental lab animals because they were relatively hardy and easy to feed, and then goes on to pigeon-breeding. (My hope is that they stop!)
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