Today city-dwellers tend to think of pigeons as “rats with wings”—pests that are good for nothing but tarnishing buildings and spreading disease. In fact, the pigeons strutting the streets today are descendants of birds that were raised in dovecotes by human beings who found them very useful. The reason why feral pigeons thrive in cities today is that we bred them for skills that serve them well in an urban environment. Wild pigeons love nesting in cliff faces, leaving home daily to forage on grains and seeds and returning home at night. Even before humans started domesticating the birds on purpose, they were probably following farming settlements, says Will Smith, a zoologist at the University of Oxford who studies feral pigeons.

---