This post was originally written for the Gather.com community.
“Oh, you’re writing a book! What’s it about?”
“Well, it’s about…..pigeons.”
I’ve reenacted this exchange in countless cocktail party conversations since I began writing this book a couple of years ago (and even before then, when I was busily working on the idea and proposal for the book). I had to explain to many, many people—friends, family, co-workers, in-laws, strangers—that I was working on a book about a bird that many people consider to be mere vermin, if they’ve considered it at all.
Reactions varied greatly. Some people laughed. Others nodded and smiled vaguely and changed the subject. One or two seemed as impressed as if I’d said I was writing about Abraham Lincoln. An elderly gentleman told me I didn’t look like a pigeon writer, which I took as a compliment. Most people were politely skeptical but also curious. The more I repeated this exchange, the more I began to find a perverse pleasure in seeing how people would react. The pigeon book became a sort of litmus test of my social interactions.
What surprised me is that, after giving it a little thought, most people had many things to say about pigeons—and a lot to ask. Even those who were skeptical at first might end up peppering me with questions after I explained a little more about the project. Pigeons aren’t a subject that most people devote time to thinking about. But we’ve all seen them, so we all have impressions, overlooked memories, and back-of-the-mind thoughts about them.
Watching people gradually unearth these hidden ideas and opinions is one of the pleasures of writing a book about a commonplace animal. I heard about the pigeons that plagued people’s apartment buildings, the homing pigeons their father kept when they were kids, the time they were frightened by a mass of pigeons in Venice, the bird with the broken wing they saw and worried about. People have many different associations with pigeons—as birds, as pests, as pets, as food—and seeing these played out in party conversations was instructive. And now that I’ve finished the book, I’m starting to realize how much I’ve grown to depend on pigeons as my own personal ice-breaker.
