Stephen Bodio - Aloft: A Meditation on Pigeons and Pigeon-Flying

Books by Stephen Bodio

A Rage for Falcons

Good Guns

Aloft

Querencia

Copyright 2014 by 1990, 1993, 2014 by Stephen Bodio

Introduction copyright 2014 by Sy Montgomery

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

Cover design by Victoria Bellavia

Front and back cover illustrations by Arthur Shilstone

ISBN: 978-1-62873-672-4

Ebook ISBN 978-1-62914-055-1

Printed in the United States of America

FOR MY MOTHER,

who put up with pigeons when I was a child;
and for Jose Morales Serrano of Sevilla, Spain;
Rudy Lucero of Alamo, New Mexico;
and Shannon Hiatt of Canutillo, Texas:
my partners.

I T IS NOTORIOUS TO ALL MANKIND, WHAT VAST NUMBERS of these Birds, in all species, have been, and are still kept in this kingdom, not only by persons in a lower rank of life, but even by persons of the greatest distinction, and the first degree of quality, who have held these birds in so great esteem, that they have endeavored to attain at least an experimental knowledge of them, purchasing, at very great expense, as many of the distinct forms as they could hear of, and cultivating them in their own houses.

Moore, Treatise on Domestic Pigeons (1735)

INTRODUCTION

Y OURE ABOUT TO READ A MEMOIR disguised as natural history, an account of sport told by an artist, a book brimming with science thats really a love story.

For Stephen Bodio, pigeons have given him everything.

Too many of us dismiss Columba livia = living bus exhaust, rats with wings. They are so common on city streets and telephone wires we see right through them. Yet for six thousand years, humans have taken delight in the species athleticism, acrobatics, resilience, and startling beauty.

Pigeons have lived among humans ever since we began to grow grain, and to further induce them to stay near us, for millennia, we have built them pigeon houses, known as dovecotes, so we could use them to carry our messages, nourish our bodies, fertilize our fields, race them for sport, and simply admire them.

For Stephen, though, pigeons offered even more. Pigeons were his muse. At age eight, he was already in love with animals, but his dads first pair of saddle-marked muffed tumblersgorgeous pigeons with whitish beaks and high foreheads, white wings and leg muffs, feathers glistening with iridescent purples and greensignited a passion that would blaze through his entire, epic, wild life. With pigeons, for the first time, Stephen fell madly in love, and it is this same love than has fueled the bottomless curiosity, unceasing commitment, and jawdropping observations that have characterized his every endeavor he has undertaken since, from hunting with hawks and coursing dogs to creating some of the most incandescent writing about nature and culture that has graced American literature in the past century.

For Stephen, pigeons opened the world. They were his sky-probes. Pigeons made the air visible. They reveal the magnetism of the Earth, the scent of the breeze, the slant of ultra-violet light, the invisible currents these birds navigate along a gauntlet of hidden hazards in the sky: owls, hawks, winds, rain, guns. Pigeons were his introduction to genetics, a cornerstone of biology. More than 800 breeds exist; pigeons are rivaled only by dogs and perhaps goldfish in the plethora of forms they can assume. Pigeons were (and are) his living link to some of humanitys most ancient and honorable lifeways, to our partnership with other species, connecting him with ancient Egyptians who awaited messages carried by pigeons to tell them whether the life-giving flood waters had returned along the Nile, and to Kublai Khan, who used a pigeon post to cover one sixth of the globe.

And pigeons opened to him a sport like no other: an invisible race with a starting line only one person sees, dozens of different finish lines, and whose excitement provokes a desire to win, he writes, that feels as real as hunger.

This revealing book is his dramatic and intense account of the passion and competition, adventure and romance of a creature all of us see but few of us know. It will ignite your own sense of wonder in a way that will surprise and delight you. Rats with wings? Nothey are walking, strutting, flying flowers as he puts it, living out mysterious lives filled with danger and excitement, bound by steely fidelity, gifted with senses of which mere humans can only dream. You will never look at pigeons the same again.

Sy Montgomery
April, 2014

CHAPTER

I N THE EARLY MORNING , when I fly my birds, the local wildlife has been up for hours. Towhees flirt up from the ground to the old fence and the sweet whistles of house finches rain down from above. Theres a quail on a fence post and a mocker skulking away, his wings whirling like one of those mechanical windmill birds. From the pigeon loft comes the rhythmic clapping of a cocks wings as he pursues a hen to the floor, followed by his rolling courting call. I can see his stifftailed inflated strut before I even open the doors.

I stop to scan the sky for hawks. It is a time of pastel colors. The sun rises here long before it emerges from behind the shoulders of the Magdalena Mountains, so that it is light but without glare for at least an hour. On this winter morning there are lead-colored clouds to the west and a stiff breeze. These may be good signs. Nothing deters a falcon. But the juvenile Coopers hawks and sharpshins that hang around the nearby town in winter are another matter. They live off the bounty of the village, eating starlings and baby fighting chickens and sparrows. Forest birds, they seem to regard the town, with its diverse plantings and narrow alleys, as an artificial woods. On still days they will venture out, sneaking from tree to tree, and I have had one dash from my isolated Siberian elm to bear away a pigeon. But their long tails and short wingsevolved to twist through tanglesare less than handy in the wind, and they stay in town.

So: over to the loft, first coffee still in hand, to throw down the outside bird door. The first two fliers hurtle through the opening, barely missing me, and flap away down wind, banging their wings like a newly mated pair. In a moment they are climbing, at first dark against the sky, then with white wingtips flashing against the blue Magdalenas. Five, six more shoot out over my shoulder, climbing after them, then all the rest in five or six coordinated bunches. Three late risers veer around me as I go to close the door. By the time I climb the ladder to my roof they are all out of sight. I turn, and turn againand there they are, coming straight toward me from town, shooting overhead, down the wind, with a multiplied sigh of wings. They are much higher than I thought they would be, and still climbing.