This is a birth note.

illustrator and science writer Rosemary Moscow is the author of the new book,

a pocket guide to pigeon watching.

It's a delightful dive into the surprising history of an unjustly maligned bird,

and what to look for in flocks of pigeons around your city.

But while Rosemary has always been a bird watcher,

I was not always a fan of pigeons.

The fascination really exploded when I was living in Toronto and one day I was walking home from work and I saw a flock of pigeons in a nearby park and one of them was eating this giant Kaiser bun and I realized it was one I had seen a few times and I started nick naming him Kaiser in my head and this this pigeon was just really, really beautiful. It had a lot of different

colors. A largely white body, I think some blue on the wings and like a little blue cap on its

head and a few shiny feathers on its neck and just really looked

almost like a like a Dalmatian or something. So I started to wonder, okay well why are

some of the pigeons more colorful than others?

People and pigeons go way back to before written history.

We domesticated them for meat and used their poop as fertilizer.

They were so useful that they became prized possessions.

And like designer dog breeds, people have been breeding fancy pigeons

for centuries.

And they've sometimes escaped or been released

and wound up adding flare to feral flocks.

You wind up getting pigeons that are basically muts

of a whole bunch of different breeds.

You'll see white ones or brown ones or all blue ones or strippy blue ones.

...