Courtney Humphries

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 of animals) but that they just moved in with our long ago ancestors.

I was especially impressed by author’s show more 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. show less

Superdove was a very enjoyable read. What made it so was the passion Courtney Humphries brought to the subject. No matter where her research took place, be it a library, the alley ways of Boston & New York, a small town in Switzerland, the cliffs of Sardinia where "true" wild pigeons still fly free, or a fancy restaurant where she tried the squab, her passion made each new adventure a pleasure to read.

There's just not been a lot of research on pigeons, and so there's not a lot of material for Humphries to work with... which means this book covers a lot of ground fairly superficially and is still short.

Which further means that it's a pretty fun read for the casual armchair naturalist. More engaging, imo, than the others of the type that I've read recently: Weeds and Subirdia.

Also do know that she's a science writer... a journalist. Not a scientist. Generally that perspective makes for a show more flawed work, but this seemed to me just fine.

And I agree with her, and with the authors of [b:Feral Pigeons|4623224|Feral Pigeons|Marian Janiga|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1348109556s/4623224.jpg|4673220], that pigeons would make a great study subject *because* they are neither truly wild nor truly domesticated.

3.5 stars rounded up because it was just a pleasure to read.

So what's your favorite book about synanthropes?
----------
Charles Darwin's grandfather Erasmus wrote poetry about evolution. I wonder why this is the first I've heard of it. Must try to find examples. [a:Erasmus Darwin|73020|Erasmus Darwin|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1383428310p2/73020.jpg] show less

As a sometime New Yorker, I have a long-standing relationship with the pigeon. In my last apartment in Queens, a family of pigeons had even nested in the airshaft of my building, using my air conditioner as a ledge upon which to build the ultimate pigeon suburban home. I've also had pigeon poo rain on me from above, so I like to think that I've seen a pretty wide spectrum of pigeon behavior. Still, it never occurred to me that there was a whole history behind these less-than-majestic show more creatures until a non-fiction history of the pigeon entered my life and changed my whole perspective on my winged neighbors.

Ms. Humphries' book took a somewhat different tack than my first pigeon book, choosing to focus on the science of the pigeon a bit more, and the fancying of the pigeon somewhat less. For someone looking to get a more zoological perspective, I suspect that this would be appreciated but for me, non-science person that I am, it was a bit disappointing. This is not to say that the science was not well-written. In fact, Ms. Humphries did an excellent job of making the connections between her pigeon-subjects and her scientific observations understandable, and I quite enjoyed her discussion of Darwin and his unexpected development of love for the pigeon. She also explained how pigeons relate to doves, how feral pigeons relate to wild pigeons, and how we interact with pigeons in our cities. It is, in fact, an expansive book, containing a rather vast quantity of data in a mere 272 pages.

This very vastness was actually one of my mild quibbles though, since it sometimes felt like Ms. Humphries was taking me on a whirlwind tour of the pigeon world and didn't want to leave anything out, even in the interest of time. For me, it would have been nice if she had gone a little bit more in-depth with some of her topics (like the Pigeon People and their movements), even if that meant leaving something else out. At times the book was also very funny, and I found myself wishing she had let that humor loose a bit more often, since I felt that it only added to the book.

Ultimately, Superdove would be an excellent book for someone looking to get a basic overview of pigeons in the context of their relationship with humans in the modern world. The history prior to the modern era was fairly brief but she did provide a chapter-by-chapter bibliography for any budding ornithologists. Also, any New Yorker (or resident of any other major city, really- the pigeon poo first struck me in Florence, Italy) might find themselves feeling a bit more benevolent towards our "rats with wings" after learning a bit more about the lowly, yet quite fascinating (and delicious), pigeon. show less