This is bird note.

It's hard to think of a more lowly regarded bird than the pigeon.

But as Rosemary Moscow writes in her book,

A Pocket Guide to Pigeon Watching,

People and pigeons go back thousands of years and were beloved by royalty.

Akbar the Great, ruler of the Mughal Empire in the 16th century, kept over 20,000 pigeons.

Akbar the Great would have visiting dignitaries watch his pigeons fly around and his hope was to sort of subdue them into awe and

you know have them want to do business with him.

And in parts of Europe, from the Middle Ages onward, pigeon owning was a privilege.

Like in France and in the UK, you were only really allowed to have pigeons if you were a royal.

England stopped enforcing this pigeon exclusivity in the mid 1600s.

But over a century later in France, peasants who built illicit pigeon houses were still being

forced to destroy them.

Meanwhile, the elite's pigeons were allowed to fly into peasant's fields and snack on

their crops. So pigeon ownership became a flashpoint in the French Revolution.

When the poor rose up.

One of the things they did was they smashed all of the pigeon houses and the people

in charge desperately passed through these measures that said that yes okay the

poor can keep pigeons.

Pigeons are no longer exclusive to nobility.

But next time you see these birds, consider giving them a little more respect.

For Bird Note, I'm Mark Ramittle.

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