A rich and joyous book about pigeons

I cannot wait to read this. I have no formal education or experience with pigeons, but they are the most fascinating thing to me on most city streets.

Their tireless and perfect vision systems are astounding (cue the typical stories of pigeons being used for pharmaceutical QA and research into using them for missile guidance).

I'm honestly surprised Scale.ai doesn't just train pigeons for their labeling problems.

There is a fenced off parking lot in the Tenderloin where some kind soul has placed a few rudimentary waterbaths and will occasionally dump grains of some kind. Because it's walled off, it's a perfect pigeon sanctuary. Locals may know what I'm speaking about, but if you haven't taken at least 30 mins on a sunny indian summer sunday to just watch them, i'd highly recommend it. even just watching the males endlessly court the females as they eat. tail down, chest up, chasing for 10 mins at a time with no end in sight.

I thought this link was going to be this article: https://www.lrb.co.uk/v41/n07/jon-day/operation-columba

which is an interesting article about pigeon service in WWII from a different British literary review magazine, and the writer of the article turns out to be the author of the book reviewed here. Definitely interested to read the book, based on these two articles.

But my favourite pigeon-related link on the internet is this fun pigeon-breeding game from the University of Utah's genetics programme: https://learn.genetics.utah.edu/content/pigeons/pigeonetics/