Hello and welcome to The Spectator Books podcast. I'm Sam Leith, the literary editor of The Spectator.

My guest this week is John Day, a lecturer in English at King's College London, and also the author of a couple of books, the most recent of which is called homing on pigeons,

dwellings, and why we return.

I've known John for a bit, and I hadn't known among his accolades is he is a pigeon fancier.

The first time we've had such a one here, at least knowing me.

John, your relationship with pigeons begins with a bird called psycho.

Yes, that's right.

Tell us about psycho.

This is a seed of this book.

It's the genesis of it, yeah, and of my obsession with pigeons, I suppose.

So when I was about, I suppose, 10 years old, my friend Nick and I used to rescue pigeons

from the streets of London,

partly because we didn't know any better, but partly also because I think we were kind of fascinated

with the natural world and you didn't get much opportunity living in central London to

encounter it other than through pigeons and similarly reviled creatures. So we used to rescue birds

and try and rehabilitate them. Often we

failed. But Psycho was a bird that thrived under our care and we fixed his broken wing. And then we

tried to train him to home to his loft because the other thing we were kind of obsessed with or interested

in was the homing instinct that pigeons are famous for.

And what we didn't know then or what I didn't know then was that pigeons home to the territory

in which they're born and they're imprinted on their home territory, their home loft,

as pigeon fancies call the sheds in which they keep their birds, around six weeks old.

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