Pigeons and People: Interspecies Practices of Identity Construction Among Urban Space Actor

Abstract (English)

The pigeon, one of the largest and most widespread synanthropic bird species, permeates every major city. Yet despite their physical ubiquity, pigeons belong to the "invisible city" due to their marginalized status. While researchers like Pankin and Orrego ("Rats as Urban Infrastructure") describe how rats create subterranean urban infrastructures (e.g., New York's tunnel networks), with human-rat encounters being rare "glitches," pigeons—though occupying the aerial dimension (rooftops, power lines)—collide with humans far more frequently. This study examines human-pigeon coexistence in urban spaces through digital ethnography, semi-structured interviews (45 respondents in Moscow/St. Petersburg), and participant observation.

Despite their abundant physical presence in the city, many respondents noted that they rarely notice pigeons:

"I hardly pay attention to them—only the dead ones, because they’re unexpected and disgusting. Live pigeons are just part of the scenery."

Those respondents who do notice pigeons—not just as obstacles overhead or underfoot—experience conflicting feelings: a desire to touch or pet them, alongside disgust at their perceived role as disease vectors, reinforced by their marginalized status. These conflicted emotions led some of my informants, as children, to treat pigeons cruelly.

Thus, I conclude that the symbolic and physical non-integration of pigeons into human urban space manifests as a state of constant conflict—a sense of needing to fight pigeons for the right to the city.

In coexisting with pigeons, people construct not only the birds’ identity but also their own. During participant observation, I noticed that in areas with large pigeon populations, there is often one person who interacts with them more than others, existing outside the usual human-pigeon conflict. When I asked respondents if they knew such a person—or how they imagined one—nearly all described an elderly, lonely individual with "quirks," a "local eccentric."

In interspecies interactions between humans and pigeons, a kind of identity exchange occurs—what de Castro calls "double twisting," where humans are assigned the marginal status of pigeons, while pigeons are anthropomorphized (Gvozdikov 2018), ascribed human-like desires for contact and emotional expression.

If, in urban space, the "strangeness" acquired through intensive pigeon interaction marks a person as potentially dangerous and an "outcast," on social media, the opposite is true. The image of pigeons and contact with live pigeons have become integral to niche "aesthetics" (e.g., weird girl aesthetic, pigeoncore), where the strangeness gained from interacting with pigeons is valorized.

The core finding of my research is that the social norm for human-pigeon interaction is ignoring them. When this norm is violated, the marginalized status of pigeons extends to the humans who engage with them.