Student Research Archivist Sasha Lawson-Frost discusses the different perspectives on pigeons we can find in the North East Nature Archive.
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One of the best things about working in a Natural History archive is discovering how different people have thought about nature across time. The North East Nature Archive has materials dating back as far as the 16th Century, and all of these items can tell us a different story about how humans see and understand the natural world.
Listening to these stories can teach us to see nature in different ways. Sometimes we can take for granted the way we think about certain animals or plants, or the way we understand the relationship between humans and wildlife. By looking at our history, we can see some of the ways that our attitudes towards nature are shaped by the world we live in.
Recently, I have been looking at a couple of different items in the archive about pigeons. To me, pigeons are an interesting animal because people don’t look at them very much. Sure, we see pigeons all the time, they are all over Newcastle. But I think we see them so often so that people don’t really stop to actually look at them and pay attention to them. They are generally seen as pests, and most of us wouldn’t think twice about seeing one fly overhead or past a window. People don’t really tend to take note of their colour variations, or the way they fly, or their different personalities.
A Victorian book about pigeons
By way of contrast, we can take a look at a book in the archive from the 1870s, called ‘The Illustrated Book of Pigeons’ by Robert Fulton. This is a book about the different breeds of pigeons. It includes information on practical aspects of pigeon breeding, as well as an overview of the literary history of pigeons (Fulton claims that Shakespeare “was evidently a close observer, if not an actual student of pigeons”).
Fulton describes pigeon breeding in a way that contrasts greatly with a modern view of pigeons as common and mundane:
“What it is, is very simply stated. It is the cultivation and pursuit of ideal beauty in its highest forms; it is the constant effort to approach a standard of perfection impossible of attainment; it is progress, ever approaching completion, yet never completed, towards a beautiful shadow which ever and anon seems within reach, yet which is never to be grasped.”
Robert Fulton, The Illustrated Book of Pigeons
High praise for birds that have also been described as ‘rats with wings’. There’s more than meets the eye in this description too. The idea that pigeon breeding is the pursuit of an ideal which can never be achieved relates to an idea about the purpose of art developed in Nineteenth-Century Romanticism. In this tradition, art is often seen as aspiring towards an ideal, which is real, but can never be fully realised. Since it cannot attain this perfect ideal, art becomes as a way of inspiring the viewer towards understanding it – something bigger than both the viewer and the artwork itself. There can also be a spiritual aspect to this, where an encounter with beauty becomes an encounter with the divine. By describing pigeons in this way, Fulton is putting pigeon breeding in the same category as great poetry and philosophy, as well as hinting at a potentially religious or holy aspect to his hobby.
Printed pigeon illustrations
The illustrations in Fulton’s book are also worth some discussion. Whenever I have shown these illustrations to people, they tend to say two things. One, ‘those are some weird looking pigeons’. Two, that the colours are very striking.
The reason the pigeons look so odd is that most of them are fancy breeds of pigeons that have been specifically bred to look like that. The ethics of this practice has been brought into question since the time Fulton was writing, because some of these genetically selected traits are harmful to the pigeons that have them. There are around 800 different species of fancy pigeon, and they are bred to emphasise certain features – like their colours or their ability to inflate their necks.
These pictures are made using print techniques which highlight some of these aesthetic features. You can see the way they highlight the iridescence of the pigeons – the shiny multi-coloured effect on their necks. This is something we still see in feral pigeons today. The illustrations replicate this effect using a method called chromolithography. Different coloured prints are overlapped with each other to create richer and more varied colours than you could get from a single layer of ink.
A nature journal about pigeons
Fulton’s book about pigeons can offer us some novel and interesting ways of thinking about pigeons. That being said, I wouldn’t exactly want to imitate Fulton’s attitude. As much as Fulton thinks that pigeons are beautiful, his focus is predominantly about the ways in which pigeons can be valuable for humans. He doesn’t talk very much about pigeons as creatures in their own right, with their own lives and behaviours independent of the ways humans use them.
Here I want to turn to another perspective from a more recent source in the archive: a nature journal created in 2023 by Rachel Beattie.
Some pages from Rachel Beattie’s nature journal
Rachel has paid a lot of attention to the behaviours and personalities of pigeons, and she clearly really loves them. I think her work can serve as a reminder to look more carefully at these animals which we see every day. Here is Rachel in her own words:
Loyal and loving, [pigeons] are companions who can express affection just as well as any other pet. When raised with love and attention, they can be a faithful and treasured companion. Being a huge bird and nature lover for about 5 years, I have managed to tame my local flock of pigeons! Starting off with one named Peter, and now I have a whole flock, with a range of unique names and surprisingly they have their own personalities. It’s quite fascinating watching their trust grow, watching how each pigeon behaves and learning unique traits of each pigeon. Now, I have a pigeon who lets me cuddle and kiss him. I have pigeons who take individual seeds from my fingers. Many of them land on my head and shoulders, and wait in my garden for me to come out and feed them. Ultimately, pigeons are one of the most underestimated birds, that people need to open their minds to, and get rid of all these made-up stereotypes. I hope that you will open your mind and see the true beauty of pigeons!”
I’m currently doing a placement with the North East Nature Archive. I am researching how different social and cultural factors have affected the practice of Natural History through time. My work is funded by the Northern Bridge Consortium of the Arts and Humanities Research Council.
