This summer, when the caretakers of Jana Bahal, a secluded baha at a crossroad between Asan and Indra Chowk, decided to enforce a schedule to when devotees could feed the temple’s feral pigeons, the decision stirred up mixed feelings. On the one hand, through the years, Jana Baha’s army of pigeons have become permanent fixtures at the temple, with several stores in the courtyard selling bird feed by the mug and the sanctum perennially reverberating with the birds’ guttural coo. But on the other, the complex was also perpetually caked with pigeon droppings, giving a white taint to everything, making clean-ups nigh impossible.

Nir Kaji Shakya, a priest at the Seto Matsyendranath (Karunamaya) Temple at the heart of the baha, maintains that the decision was a bid to find a happy medium. “We could never have enforced an outright ban,” he says, acknowledging the deep cultural and religious significance attached to feeding pigeons, “This way people can still feed the birds until 11 am.” Shakya hopes that the newly-enforced schedule will curb the amount of litter at the temple, a concern particularly because of the temple’s gilded roof that is susceptible to corrosion from the uric acid in bird droppings. Yet, he is also fully aware that given the sheer number of pigeons at the complex and the long-standing cultural proclivity for feeding them, the odds remain forever in the birds’ favour.

Vermin of the sky

Jana Baha complex is one of the many sites in the Valley popular for bird feeding. The three Durbar Squares, Swoyambhu, Boudha and Pashupati are some popular thoroughfares that sport dozens of vendors pawning bird feed to devotees and visitors alike. On any given day, at Basantapur, for instance, dozens of people with plastic Tupperware in their hands are flocked by hundreds of pigeons, as friends and tourists train their cameras to catch a bird in perfect flight. But this familiar sight is hardly unique just to Kathmandu. In fact, apart from the two poles and the Sahara, pigeons are found everywhere, quite literally.

The feral pigeons (common, urban, street or stray pigeons as they are also called)—the bluish grey birds we are all familiar with—are the descendents of rock pigeons domesticated by humans for food. It has been suggested that pigeons have been domesticated for at least 10,000 years (the second animals to be domesticated after dogs) by the then inhabitants of the Middle-East who realised that the birds were easily enticed by food and readily trained. Furthermore, given that pigeons have robust breeding cycles—with them laying pairs of eggs up to six times a year—breeders quickly realised that these birds were an easy, nearly perpetual source of meat. As a result, pigeons, or squabs as they are also known as in the food industry, have featured in cuisines around the world for millenniums. 

Today, the feral cousins of these domesticated birds continue to live in close proximity to human settlements all around the globe. Because they can nest in tiny spaces like ledges, eaves and air conditioners and feed on human refuse, the species has flourished, particularly in urban centres. Their habitual scavenging and their ubiquitous presence have also earned them far-from-flattering labels such as ‘rats with wings’ and ‘vermin of the sky’.

A pigeon for a pie?

Given their abundant numbers (it is estimated that there are up to 30 million feral pigeons in Western Europe alone) and their long history of being used as food, it is often questioned why urban pigeons aren’t more popular as food. A 2008 tongue-in-cheek article in the Wired—titled Pigeons: The Next Step in Local Eating—playfully suggested that pigeons were in fact “waste scavenging, protein-generating biomachines” that could be a “new source of guilt-free protein for locavores in urban centres.” Humans, after all, hunted and ate the Passenger Pigeon, close cousins of the feral pigeons, to extinction in the last century.

But despite the fact that squab and domesticated pigeons remain popular delicacies around the world, there are no cultures that actually eat feral pigeons. Generally viewed as dirty, and carriers of disease, feral pigeons are treated more as pests then they are protein. Studies have shown that pigeons can carry dozens of harmful pathogens and fungus that can cause a host of diseases like Histoplasmosis, Psittacosis and even the fatal Cryptococcus meningitis, though the studies are quick to assure that living in close proximity to pigeons is rarely dangerous. Besides, the fact that feral pigeons snack on anything and everything, including lead-coated paint chips and sundry, determining the level of accumulated toxicity in the animal always remains tricky. 

The universal rejection of feral pigeon meat has come as a blessing for the birds themselves. The birds might have been once domesticated for food, and continue to do their jobs of voraciously breeding, we humans have just stopped our jobs of eating them, ensuring that pigeons are as much a fixture of cities, as are skyscrapers, parks and street lamps.

Pigeon-holed

Some cities, however, are fighting back. Mumbai and Delhi, for instance, with their many Kabutar khaanas, are also grappling with booming populations of feral pigeons. In the past decade, there have been several attempts to move these feeding sites away from densely populated areas, if they aren’t closed altogether. Other explored options have included installing nylon nettings or spikes onto windows, roofs and eaves to prevent the birds from perching or planting thorny vines, like the Bougainvillea.

Other famous landmarks, like the Trafalgar Square in London and St Mark’s Square in Venice have banned the sale of bird feed, claiming that the pigeon poop and the birds pecking away at marble statues and structures were causing irreparable damage.

Kathmandu-based ornithologist Hem Sagar Baral, however, maintains that pigeons remain a crucial part of the local ecosystem. For him the answer, like many other cities are practicing already, lies in restoring natural checks and balances. He suggests that if predatory birds, like the Peregrine Falcon, were reintroduced to the cities, it would quickly cap the pigeon population. “Peregrine falcon used to breed in the Valley, but not anymore,” he says, “Were we to promote the population of these falcons, and birds of prey like them, the pigeon population would be checked automatically.” Baral pegs the explosion of Kathmandu’s pigeon population squarely on the loss of habitat of their natural predators, which include the dwindling numbers of Kathmandu’s urban feral cats that once populated the buigals of sequestered neighbourhoods.

The killings of the birds, however, can sometimes work only momentarily. Daniel Haag-Wackernagel, a biologist at the University of Basel, told Der Spiegel that “killing pigeons makes no sense, because they just come back,” pointing to failed mass poisoning campaigns undertaken by many cities. Haag-Wackernagel, suggests that poisoning grains at a site does not deter other pigeons from continuing to perch nearby; in fact, they see it as more food for them. For him, the answer lies in controlling the food that is handed out to the birds, as “there is a linear relationship between the bird population and the amount of food available.” If there is less food to go around, he continues, the pigeon population will naturally nose-dive.

And by those standards, Jana Baha, might have, at their first attempt, found the midway it was  looking for.