I've become keen on pigeons lately, as a couple of neighborhood birds have taken a liking to sitting in the windowsill next to my new desk to stare at me while tilting their heads sideways. I like my new friends for bringing a bit of the urban wilderness into my daily desk-bound existence. And yes, it's sad that my notion of "the wilderness" has become so debased that it has come to this.
Then my obsession deepened and I discovered a whole subset of the pigeon population that was previously unknown to me, carrier pigeons. An even more exciting discovery was the existence WORLD RENOWNED pigeons like Cher Ami (believe it or not, he is not the only pigeon with a Wikipedia biography), a homing pigeon that helped save 200 lives during WWI and ended his last mission blinded and with one leg hanging by a thread. After amputating the leg, a wooden prosthesis was made for the war hero. He's now in the Natural History Museum, forever immortalized by a taxidermist and the Smithsonian Institution.
