When I was a younger, every night without fail, my mother would watch the NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams. To have cable in Jamaica was a luxury and the massive satellite dish outside our house that could land jumbo jets saw to that. I would sit with her, having finished my dinner, seeing if I could eke out more time being up before the inevitable frogmarch to the bathroom and then to bed. When you’re younger and watching the news, the brain seems to blend news stories and because most of the news came from America and wasn’t really pertinent to the country I was living in, my four year old brain connected dots that weren’t there. For example, I remember witnessing the 2004 tsunami in Thailand - the massive wave descending on the beaches and the aftermath, broken homes and wandering survivors lost and scared among the rubble. I think it stuck to me because I lived not too far from the sea and would wonder what would happen if a tsunami hit Jamaica. I would constantly imagine a massive wave descending on the people of Montego Bay. I had just learnt how to swim without armbands and was confident I personally, would survive and had an almost condescending pity towards the people affected by the event. Why didn’t they just swim with the wave? Didn’t they know that if you found yourself in trouble in open water you float on your back? And if the people affected didn’t know this, why weren’t they still in armbands? It was probably best that these opinions stayed mute in my four year old mouth because clearly I wasn’t very bright.
The other constant news story was 9/11. I was too young to remember the actual incident but remember the years not too long after. Still present in everyone’s brain, it was constantly referred to. My lack of historical knowledge and current affairs led me to believe that 9/11 was what people called the tsunami. I didn’t know what 9/11 was, but clearly it was a major event and to me a massive wave obliterating everything seemed to be pretty significant so I made the connection and went about ignorant as ever.
Around the same time the news was running lots of stories on identity theft. I don’t exactly know why, but stories of this crisis were interspersed with news about the burgeoning bird flu epidemic. News reel footage of pigeons and chickens flocking together over newscasters explaining what it was flooded our screens. I remember being sort of confused as to how they were connected, not realising that they in fact, were not. In all honesty, at age five, I didn’t know what an identity was so I assumed it was bird medicine.
Much like the pandemic we find ourselves in now, bird flu seemed to be blamed on the Chinese. And much like it does now, this felt like an unfair and rather blind assumption. It made no sense. How can bird flu be blamed on other countries. Not only was it unfair as it wasn’t the Chinese’s fault that their identities were being stolen but I had empirical evidence that supported the hypothesis that birds were not exclusive to China. Along with that, the culprit was clearly stated in the name of the disease. It was called bird flu not Chinese flu. Unlike the Spanish Flu or the West Nile Virus, the culprit was being identified correctly. I can’t think of one idiot that would call a virus something like the Chinese virus. Try to imagine a country run by that kind of person. The birds were the obvious culprit. It made sense that birds could spread disease across the globe, they could fly after all. Bird flu eventually died down and the hysteria moved on to pigs a few years later with swine flu. That along with various strains of dengue and Zika in the Caribbean carried by mosquitos, the animal kingdom was starting resemble more and more like a collection of hypochondriacs anonymous.
Now with coronavirus and lockdown, I take lots of walks and therefore I see a lot of pigeons. I can’t help but think about the bird flu when I see them, as London, to me, seems to mainly consist of oat milk drinkers and pigeons. Belonging to the former group, I try to distance myself as far as possible from the latter. In my eyes, much like corona, these birds are constantly airborne, flying amongst the coughing and virus particles or whatever you call them (microbiology is not my strong suit) and I can’t help but looking at them as disease carrying vermin. If studies came to show that pigeons were what spread corona so rapidly across the globe I would not be surprised. Their bulbous growths on their beaks, their odd bob as they walk. They look like what a disease would look like if it had evolved into a bird. In my eyes, they are no different from the rats that carried the Black Plague around the Middle Ages, decimating Europe. Rats at least have the decency to treat themselves like vermin. Rats and mice, when spotted, retreat. “I know, I know, I’m a piece of shit,” they seem to say as they scurry away from a human’s wary eye back into their dark crevices. Pigeons do not have such humility. They’re everywhere. They walk around train stations as if they have somewhere important to be. They sit near park benches, leaning into private conversations. Everywhere you walk, they’re there. If you redirected my internal monologue towards pigeons to a person, I would be seen as a bigot.
“You don’t belong here!” I say to them in my head. “We don’t want you. Go back to where you came from and take your whole family too.” I’m not discriminatory towards pigeons but I do harbour a severe prejudice. I don’t go graffiti their establishments with hate symbols nor do I tell my non-existent children that they can’t date them if they don’t want to. I imagine a daughter (if I had one) bringing one home and telling me she’s in love. I would be polite, and smile gracefully as the pigeon settled itself into my home but secretly would hope that they would break up and she would go off and marry a sensible goldfinch or hummingbird, something with more character and less fleas. Last of all, I don’t display any extreme forms of violence towards the birds but I know of people who do.
Bird bush season usually lasts from late August into September and for some Jamaicans it is the highlight of their year. The bird bush lovers wake up early in the morning during this period, packing up their cars with guns, to go and bring home what we call pea doves. Calling this bird a pea dove is much like how on my resume I say I was an administrative assistant for my parent’s wood shavings company because I proofread one email for them. In reality, the pea dove is a pigeon with a good PR team. The pageantry that goes into hunting this pigeon is near comical. It makes the fox hunters in England with their red coats and horns look like amateurs. The uptown Jamaican will rise before sunrise to fully deck themselves out in camouflage. And I mean fully. The camouflage is worn without a hint of irony. Without context, it would seem as if these uptown Jamaicans were trying to reenact the Vietnam War, crouching in their olive green camo, waiting for the deadly guerrilla soldier with Communist tendencies. They are the US Army and the pigeon is the Viet Cong. I don’t know why you would need camouflage to shoot a six inch high animal with a literal bird brain. Not to be cocky, but I’m sure if I walked into bird bush with flared jeans and a bright yellow t-shirt that said “Pea Doves. Count Your Days” I could still nab a few. That is if I knew how to shoot a gun. Yet, they tramp into the Jamaican bush and reign hellfire on this bird. It really is a bit over the top and whenever that time of year comes I have to stop myself from commenting Lieutenant Dan! on the Instagram pages of the smiling people holding up a throng of dead birds.
My family was sometimes invited to the aftermath of these battles. The victors would return in an almost warlike repose, the Spartans retuning from war with their hand sized enemies. While the perpetrators stood drinking rum and beer, the victim lay in a dish of gravy, hardo bread by its side. The meat is dark and there isn’t much of it (as half of it has been blown off by the dozens of bullets aimed at it) and it’s the only time I feel halfway bad for the pigeon. If you sniff hard enough, the smell of napalm still lingers in the air. The enemy of my enemy is my friend, but I still feel a bit lost amongst these veterans. Their children, some of which were my friends similarly fashioned in the green and black gear, were too old to hold a gun, so would talk excitedly about how they were given the job to pluck the bird of its feathers. I would start to feel almost guilty.
“I’m sorry.” I want to say to the carcass lying in gravy, “I know we don’t get along, but this is overkill.”
My sympathy rarely lasts long. On holiday to Milan I was barely in the city for two hours when my disgust came out in full force. Outside the beautiful Gothic cathedral at the centre of the city, were millions of pigeons. To add insult to injury, tourists were taking pictures with them - willingly. A business had been made focusing on these creature and people would throw breadcrumbs at the feet of tourists summoning thousands of the vermin. Laughing vacationers held out their hands and arms to be flocked with pigeons, the beautiful architecture of Duomo di Milano lost behind the greyish rounded heads of the beasts. I myself tried to take pictures of the 700 year old church but after someone threw a pile of seeds and breadcrumbs at my feet, causing a cacophony of the feathered demons to appear, I gave up. I looked at the smiling people and was lost. These pigeons were neither indigenous nor restricted to the square outside the Milanese cathedral and yet everyone had collectively decided to ignore this.
“A pigeon, how novel. We only have 18 million back in the UK” their dopey smiles seemed to say. I imagined the pigeons descending on the tourists, clawing their eyes out while cooing like the maniacs they are. That would show them. People who travel to foreign countries with great sites of culture to take a picture with an animal that is officially described as a pest should not be allowed to travel in the first place.
“They’re not that bad. They’re kind of cute if you think about it,” some people say to me when I voice my disgust. I tend to avoid those people because they’re often the type who don’t wear deodorant. I much prefer the people who see them as I do. Rats… with wings. However, they’re rats with wings that aren’t going anywhere and so I can do nothing but resolve to live grudgingly amongst them. As I clutch my oat latte to my chest, I weave in-between these birds during my daily walks, hoping one doesn’t touch me as they languish in dirty puddles and rifle through the garbage left on the ground. One bobs towards me, cooing gently, and I step back, rushing home to see just how much a camouflage jacket might cost.