Pigeons In The Cold

HOW I KILLED TWO PIGEONS

I've sometimes wondered where all the pigeons in the parks and plazas go at night.  During the day, there they are, strutting around in their (seeming) millions, competing for sidewalk space with busy humans, crapping everywhere, then once darkness comes they are -- whoosh! -- gone.  Where do they disappear to?

Once I killed a pigeon by accident -- I was driving up a freeway ramp, accelerating to join the traffic flow, when suddenly this pigeon shot up out of nowhere, tried to fly across in front of my pickup and crashed into the windshield.  I did not bother stopping to check.

And I've killed another one -- deliberately.  At the time I was living in an upper-floor apartment with a balcony.  A small flock of pigeons frequented the roof of a house across the lane, and at one point two of their members -- presumably a mating pair -- decided to fly over and enfeoff my balcony as their private domain.  Every time I saw them cooing around, tramping on the furniture and ducking in and out around all the items that had accumulated there over time, I would get annoyed and chase them away, but they stubbornly kept coming back again and again.  I don't like my private space invaded -- not by people, not by bugs, and not by birds -- and it was as if they were determined to pester me day after day.

Finally, one day I just couldn't take it any more and went after them with a "reach extender" -- you know, one of those devices with a handle and trigger at one end of a shaft and a claw at the other end

(courtesy of the internet)

-- because I'd always heard that pigeons are filthy, infested with external parasites, even that they are "rats on the wing", and didn't want to touch them.  One of them managed to fly off immediately, but the other one was trapped among the large miscellany of objects on the balcony and although I had a time of it, I finally succeeded in grabbing it around its chest.  I held it upside down, then smashed it headfirst onto the guardwall, instantly breaking its neck, or skull, or both.  Its mate never came back after that.

Anyhow, as to where pigeons go at night, I guess they "take shelter" like this:

Except, of course, it's no shelter at all.  When I saw them like this in an alley in the late afternoon, exposed to the freezing wind and looking miserably subdued and gloomy, I actually felt sorry for them.

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