Birds · plate 40 of 60
Pigeon
Columba livia
Finds its way home from anywhere. Then stays.
Only 3.3% of people are Pigeons. (estimated)
If you're a Pigeon
You are at home anywhere, loyal to one partner and underrated by everyone. Pigeons pair for life, share the incubating, feed their chicks on milk made in the throat and find their way back from hundreds of kilometers away; you have the same gifts and the same press. Thirty-two pigeons have received medals for bravery. You have received a stare on the bus.
In 1995 pigeons were trained to tell a Monet from a Picasso, and then correctly sorted paintings by those artists that they had never seen before.
The Pigeon as a spirit animal
Matching a Pigeon says you are adaptable, devoted and far cleverer than your reputation, which is a reputation you share with the whole species. You thrive in a crowd, stick with one partner and always know the way home. The flaw is that you are so good at fitting in that nobody notices; you have been doing something remarkable in plain sight and getting shooed for it. Carry on. The medals exist.
Grounded in how the species actually lives; nothing borrowed from anyone's tradition. Why we put it that way.
How to get along with a Pigeon
Do
- Let them come home; they always do, and they count on it being there.
- Share the work; pigeon parents split everything down the middle.
- Notice them. It happens rarely and it lands.
Don't
- Don't judge them by the crowd they are standing in.
- Don't move the landmarks. They navigate by them.
When it goes wrong: A Pigeon under pressure takes off in a clatter and circles until things settle; give them time, keep the home spot where it was and they land exactly where they left.
The Pigeon in a relationship
You love steadily, equally and at home. Pigeons pair for life, bow and coo at each other daily, take turns on the eggs and both feed the young; you are a true partner, unflashy, present and reliable. Nobody writes songs about it. Doves get those. Same bird.
Field notes
Every animal is placed on six personality traits derived from how the species lives. Your answers are placed on the same six, and the closest animal wins. How the scoring works
- Sociability
- 9
- Boldness
- 6
- Energy
- 5
- Curiosity
- 4
- Devotion
- 8
- Roaming
- 3
- Homing pigeons use the sun, the Earth's magnetic field, smell and, when available, highways to find their way home.
- Both pigeon parents make a protein-rich crop milk and feed it to the squabs for the first days of life.
- The feral pigeon is the same species as the racing pigeon and the rock dove, domesticated thousands of years ago.
Pigeons in literature
- The Pigeon — Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll (1865)
- The Two Pigeons — Fables (The Two Pigeons), Jean de La Fontaine (1678)
- The Dove — Aesop's Fables (The Ant and the Dove), Aesop (550 BCE)
Characters from public-domain works. Company, not a verdict.
Closest personalities
The animals whose profiles sit nearest to the Pigeon's. If you got Pigeon, one of these was probably your runner-up.
Other birds
EagleOwlRavenHummingbirdPeacockPenguinFlamingoAlbatrossParrotSwanWoodpeckerFalconOstrich
Among the 60
A History of British Birds, William Yarrell (1843). Public domain, viacommons.wikimedia.org.All credits
