Birds of a Feather? A pigeon, a dove, and your new neighbor

A friend of mine once had a giant poster of a dove - surrounded by rainbows and peace signs and such - on the wall of her college apartment. (As I recall, she hoped to have white dives released at her wedding too.) A few feet away, she had spikes on the windowsill, hoping to do away with pesky pigeons.

And why not?

Doves are magnificent birds - dusky colors and sweet cooing voices and all the ages of symbolic meaning of love, purity or mouring and of course world peace. They get some very good press in the Bible, one even portraying the Holy Spirit at Jesus' baptism. Now that's a bird with a good agent.

Pigeons, on the other hand, poop on the sidewalk, mainly. They wake you up with their noise, and are basically ugly, dirty, disease-ridden, beggar birds that people are more than willing to shoot by the dozen or poison. In Jesus' time, they were raised to be sacrificed - not a great gig if you're the bird.

Perception is an interesting thing.

Because the beloved beautiful dove and the maligned ugly pigeon are the same bird.

Oh, an ornithologist might pick nits with me here, but trust me - doves and pigeons are same class, order and family... columbidae to be specific. Closer than biological cousins, at least. In fact, in most countries including Russia there is only one term for both doves and pigeons.

Funny thing about those birds we would call pigeons in our region, too.

Once you stop believing what people tell you about them being dirty and dumb, they can be amazing creatures.

Studies have found that a common pigeon can be trained to discriminate between paintings by Picasso, Monet and Van Gogh as well at it as human college students with the same amount of training.

They adapt to urban habitat better than any other, at home in Paris or Storm Lake.

Pigeons recognize themselves as individuals in a mirror, a level of though only humans, dolphins, elephants and a few primates can do. They can recall large series of numbers for years at a time.

White rock pigeons fly over 55 miles per hour, and can navigate their way home from hundreds of miles away. They have been used to carry messages since acient Egypt. The Taliban so fear the bird's capability that they recently banned them from being used in Afghanistan.

The French pigeon Cher Ami received the Croix de Guerre, a military decoration given to soldiers for heroism in combat. Cher Ami delivered a message that saved the lives of 194 American soldiers during World War I, despite being shot through the breast by the Germans, blinded in one eye, covered in blood, and with a leg hanging only by a tendon. Consider that next time you shoo a worthless bird off your windowsill.

Pigeons and doves - same thing. More alike than they are different, to be sure.

People are like that, aren't they?

We all have our prejudices. We speak of black ones, pink ones, yellow ones, brown ones, ones with a different religion or language, as if they were something different than ourselves. We know full well that underneath, we are closer than cousins.

Only the shade of our feathers is really different, and maybe the terminology we use to prejudicially descibe each other.

We've come a long way, notably so right here in Storm Lake. Covering the local high school football team this year, I couldn't help but notice pale blonde kids besides African-American kids beside Asian-American kids beside Latino Americans kids on that team, and various combinations in between. I seriously doubt that at any moment during that season, any one of them thought of themselves as foremost being any color - except perhaps green and white, the shade of their uniforms.

We probably are all guilty of viewing "our kind" as the metaphorical pure dove, and some other as the polluting pigeon, at times.

I don't know if we will ever come to zoologically realize that our beautiful dove and our hated pigeon are all the same thing.

But I do have hope that we are drawing closer to realizing that people are the same. All have their potential for intelligence, loyalty to their home, and potential for courage - in common.

No matter what name some choose to apply to downgrade any of us.

There is beauty in all, if you can look deeper than the coloring and outer trappings.

Prejudice on the windowsill of humanity makes no more sense when it is directed at human beings than it does when it's, shall we say, for the birds.

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Speaking of birds, I've been on the local Swan Committee since the beginning, and it's a thrill to now see wild swans begin to migrate back to our lake after an absence of 140 years.

As our pairs of mated birds age, it is time to face the fact that our program will not last for many more years. We will either have to obtain new breeding birds, or find that the effort has beaten extinction successfully and leave it to nature do the rest.

Personally, I'll be proud when all the swans here are free, wild ones.

Though we have cared for, fed and protected the clipped adult birds we have, they are swans, and all of us who love them know that swans are created to fly free.

I recall the children's book, "Mouse to be Free" by Joyce Warren, about a little girl who saved a mouse from danger, and kept it in a cage. When she realized it was safe and warm, but unhappy there, she let it go.

"I'll risk hunger and cold - I'd rather you see. For a mouse to be happy - Has got to be free..."

I wonder if our flightless swans long for the sky. If it was me, I would.