The #1 Bestseller Among Pigeons!
With the help of pigeon-whisperer Blessing Tawengwa, I recently took some publicity photos of The Eye of the Sandpiper. (That was the book’s long game: giving me a plausible excuse to lie on the ground photographing pigeons….)
Pigeons star in one of the articles, “What Pigeons Teach Us About Love,” which originally appeared in Nautilus. It’s one of my favorites. They also feature in an WIRED piece on Wild Bird Fund,a wildlife hospital on New York City’s Upper West Side. Rita McMahon, the hospital’s founder, taught me how to look at pigeons: the distinctive plumage patterns, typically checkered or barred; the white feathers of birds whose forebears escaped from rooftop coops still found in Brooklyn and the Bronx, where pigeon-breeding became popular in the 1950s, and where a few old-timers still send their flocks dancing skyward each evening; the rusty mixed hues of pigeons born to unions of wild and escaped birds.
The pigeons who live where Blessing and I took our photographs, in a little park beside Riverside Church, are a kaleidoscope of pigments and histories. Like New York City itself, a true melting pot of life.
