The Pigeon Puzzle

Yesterday between church services Lori and I decided to have a picnic in the park so we went to the grocery store and picked up a loaf of bread and some cheese. (Cheap, but good.) I realized shortly after that we didn’t have a knife to cut our cheese with. Turns out that library cards make great cheese cutters. I mean, they’ll cut a block of cheddar as well as a machete. So if you ever forget a knife on a picnic, just whip out your Old Navy discount card or your Driver’s License.

While reading on our picnic blanket, however, my attention was drawn from Bilbo Baggin’s eleventy-first birthday party of special magnificence to a group of pigeons who seemed to be in quite a hurry to go somewhere that was obviously very important, except that they changed directions faster than a Yankees sweep over the Red Sox. Did they have any real place to go? That got me thinking about pigeons. Have you ever thought about pigeons? There seems to be a lot of missing pieces to the pigeon puzzle. For example, why are pigeons always so fat? Why do they have crazy robotic movements? Why do they only congregate in places that are over 95% concrete? Do they build nests? And most mystifying, have you ever seen a baby pigeon? I for one have never been able to answer these questions. However, I haven’t put a lot of thought in them either. So what better thing to think about during a picnic? I’ve developed two theories:

A) Pigeons are hybrid animals like mules. Maybe they’re like a cross between Lake Ella ducks and chickadees or something. This would explain why there aren’t any baby pigeons. Mules are a cross between a donkey and a horse, but they cannot reproduce and make more mules. Mules only come from donkeys and horses, not two mules. So maybe this is how pigeons are too. The robotic movements and lack of nesting can be explained by the fact that they are an unnatural mutation. (And they certainly look as such.) Although, this theory cannot explain the overabundance of pigeons in city centers where ducks tend not to congregate. It also does not explain why pigeons are always so fat. So this brings us to my more probable theory, Theory B:

B) Pigeons are actually trained government spies and they have cameras and or recording devices implanted in them. (This explains the awkward movement.) The government breeds them in laboratories (this explains why there are no nests and no eggs), and they’re placed in cities because that is where they need the most surveillance (this is why they like concrete). They are fat because they are given treats when they come back to the laboratory as incentive to bring back their information for collection.

Passenger pigeons never actually died out, they were just replaced with a newer model of pigeon, known to government scientists as the P-2- your standard city pigeon. However, the Green Party paid the government a lot of money to let everyone think the passenger pigeon went extinct because of human cruelty to promote more tree-hugging. [Daniel Northrup, Gather Round a Tree and Hug It. Ch. 4, Pg. 59.]

I would welcome more thoughts on this issue.