What Pigeons Teach Us About Love

Love is as love does. “There’s no reason to think it would be much different for humans than nonhumans,” says Marc Bekoff, author of The Emotional Lives of Animals. “I’ve known mourning doves”—a species closely related to pigeons—“who were more in love than a lot of the people I’ve known.” To Bekoff, love’s ultimate measure is the presence of its converse, grief.

Apparent grieving exists in the avian world, most notably among greylag geese, in whom individuals who’ve lost a partner display the classical symptoms of human depression: listlessness, a loss of appetite, lethargy lasting for weeks or even months. The same applies to pigeons. On Pigeon Talk, a website of pigeon-breeding hobbyists, anecdotes abound of birds sinking into a funk after losing their mates, and sometimes refusing to take another mate for up to a year afterward—no small time for a species that typically lives for less than a decade.

One of the most moving stories involves mourning doves. After a dove was eaten by a hawk in the backyard of a forum member called TheSnipes, the mate stood beside the body for weeks. “I finally couldn’t stand to watch it any more and picked up every feather and trace of remains that was left there and got rid of it,” wrote TheSnipes. “The mate continued to keep a vigil at that spot though, for many months, all through the spring and summer.”

McMahon noted something I hadn’t considered: There are good and bad pigeon couples. Some are attentive and physically affectionate, constantly stroking one another’s feathers. Others appear distant and peckish. As human love varies, so might theirs. Not every pigeon’s tale need be so romantic as Fly High, Fly Low, Don Freeman’s delightful children’s book about the search of Sid for his mate Midge, lost to him—though only for a while—when workers take down the sign in which they’ve made their nest. Others might better resemble Maud and Claud of Patricia Highsmith’s “Two Disagreeable Pigeons,” regarding each other with pique and scorn, kept together by inertia and habit.

It’s also worth considering whether pigeons might experience aspects of love that we don’t. Could a bird whose basic physiology adapts to changing seasons, who can perceive atmospheric infrasound, and see Earth’s magnetic field, have emotional capacities beyond our own? Including, perhaps, forms of love that are not merely analogues of our cherished feelings, but something unique to them?

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