True Facts: Pigeons Are Tricking You

This episode is sponsored by Curiosity Stream.

You might think that pigeons are just mindless peckers.

Well, then, what's this one doing pecking at a computer screen?

Why is this one in a box with a banana?

And will this pigeon live to see another day?

Well, you're about to find out.

If you've ever seen the pigeon walk,

you might have wondered what's going on with all the head bobbing.

Are they broken?

And they do a lot of it - up to eight times a second - so fast, in fact,

that it wasn't until the 1960s that they realized

that this forward and backwards motion was an illusion.

It's not a bob, it's a thrust and stop.

You can see it if you slow it down.

The head goes first

and then stays absolutely still while the body moves forward to join it.

And it turns out they're not broken at all.

This movement has to do with their vision.

Here's one way to look at it.

Let's say that you are casually perusing some random page on the Internet.

You wouldn't do this - continuous scrolling.

No, you can't focus on anything. It’d make you sick.

That's why it's hard to go through an Instagram

feed with someone else driving, for example.

More likely you would do something like this.

Scroll and pause.

And that's because the light receptors in our eyes

need a moment to recover between images, or else it's all a blur.

That's essentially what the pigeon is doing with its head.

Now, we don't bob our heads like the pigeon do,

but our eyes are constantly trying to keep the world still. Here.

Try and move your eye from that teal dot to the orange dot along the horizon line.

Notice what your eyes are doing. They’re jumping a bit like this.

You can try as hard as you like, but you can't move them smoothly.

But you don't experience that motion as your eyes jump from one

place to the next because your eyes sort of shut down during those jumps.

If you look at this image, you'll notice that your eyes seem to automatically move

in the direction of the motion, which is a reflex designed to keep the image still.

And these sorts of reflexes are found in almost all animals that have eyes

and are responsible for things like the gyroscopic head of a chicken,

a murder chicken.

Anyway, if you put a pigeon on a treadmill that’s

moving at the same speed that they're walking,

they don't bob their head when they walk because their surroundings are still.

And “Pigeon on a treadmill” is

the name of your next album. You're welcome.

Now, if you spend any time watching pigeons, you might be wondering

on a scale of one to a leg humping Chihuahua, just how horny are they?

I'm sure you've seen it.

A male pigeon

does this head bowing thing and waddles up to a female with his tail fanned out.

He can look a bit pushy, to be honest,

and a lot of these gestures are the same as a male would use to be aggressive.

But in this case, it's more like a dance.

Jerry these are wood pigeons.

I don't care if it's cheaper, Jerry. It's the wrong species.

How much cheaper?

well, let's hope they don't notice.

He bows, and then she might peck at the ground a bit.

Naughty. And seeing that, he might turn

a circle or two and rush towards her and then stop and preen for a moment.

It's exciting.

Gets the hormones flowing, and at this point he might go in for a little peck.

Not a kiss like an actual peck.

And that might lead to beaking, which is when you know it's getting real.

So she puts her beak inside his beak and he pukes up a little food for her to eat.

I mean, we've all done it. No?

Now, of course, reeling from the glorious taste of his vomit, she might squat down,

signaling she's up for it.

And then it's just a matter of getting your tail feathers out the way.

But of course, if you're out on the street watching, most of the time,

it doesn't seem to go that well for the males.

And you might think the whole pigeon scene is a bunch of bachelors

getting rejected all day.

But here's the thing.

First off, pigeons will often mate for life,

which means a lot of these pigeons probably know each other.

And it's more of a -

“No, Steve, I don't know what has two thumbs and wants to get laid.

And I told you the joke doesn't work. You don't have thumbs.

God.”

And these displays aren't always just about leading up to mating either.

Couples will

often do these displays to reconnect, and it can actually be quite adorable.

Wings all wrapped around each other.

And they do a little version of this dance when it's time to pick a location

for the nest.

All right, so we should probably have a chat about pigeons nests.

Look at this.

I type in pigeons, and I can find a whole episode on the pigeons of New York City.

There's people who raise them on the rooftops over there.

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today. Where were we? Oh right.

Now pigeon nests get a bit of a bad rap.

I mean, it's true that some of them look like the pigeons

read the instructions after a bottle of tequila

and then woke up vaguely remembering that it had something to do with sticks.

I mean, come on, that looks like the end of Act 2 in the Three Little Pigs.

But before you judge, you should ask what the purpose of that nest is anyway.

These sorts of pigeons

are essentially domesticated rock doves, and rock doves are cliff dwellers.

And in those little cliff hidey holes, the main thing is to make sure your egg

don't roll away.

They don't have to build some sturdy stick bowl to make it stay in a tree.

Although, side note, you don't need a nest in a tree either.

It turns out the white tern turns out an egg

right under the armpit of a tree branch.

No sticks at all.

So by comparison, a pigeon is a regular Frank Lloyd Wright of nest building.

And even if it is a single stick, don't you worry.

Those babies are going to be comfy.

Mom and Dad are on it.

Literally.

They take turns sitting on that nest and almost never leave it unattended.

They take it serious.

I mean, you can see they don't even always make it to the outhouse.

I know it's not explicitly written in most parenting books, but I do think the norm

is to put some distance between the crib and where you s***. No judgment.

Anyway, this goes on for a while.

Look at the babies. Adorable.

If you've never seen a pigeon baby

before, it's because they stay in the nest for up to a month after they hatch.

And by then, when they can fly away, they look all grown up.

And there it is.

That's the life of a pigeon.

Do a little dance,

make a little love, get down or a stick, you know, for the nest.

Rinse and repeat.

And you might wonder if maybe there's not that much going on

in those little noggins.

And of course, that's why they put one in a box with a banana.

See if the pigeon could work that out.

I know the temptation here is to feel superior.

Like, come on, I could do that.

But listen, have you ever been in a box with a banana?

Might be kind of overwhelming

going through the life choices you made that led you to that moment.

And depending on how ripe the banana is, it might stink in there.

I mean, it's enough to make this pigeon forget it can f***ing fly, you know, but

it eventually has the wherewithal to use a little stool when it gets a bit peckish.

And once you show a science hippie,

you can do something like that, forget about it.

They’re testing you on everything.

They wanted

to understand courtship better and set up a whole video dating scenario.

And it worked.

The pigeons saw each other on the screen and started doing, you know, the moves.

But then the science hippies put a delay in the feed.

So he's like, “What's your name?” And she says nothing.

He says, “Do you come here often?” “Nancy.”

And he's like, “Oh, is Nancy a name?”

And she's like, “No, it's my first time.”

And the whole thing gets screwed up.

But now they know that there's some back and forth going on.

And you might be thinking, well, what are they looking for?

What makes a bird attractive?

So just like on Tinder, you can show a pigeon photos

and see which one elicits a courtship response.

And you can manipulate those images to accentuate certain traits.

Maybe make the eyes bigger or... that.

I mean, if you have Photoshop open, you might as well go for it.

Anyway, it turned out that the eyes didn't

matter so much, but they did like a nice sized beak.

But here's the thing, though. It didn't matter where it was.

You could swap the beak and the eye and they'd still be into it.

What's crazy is: this has support from an experiment in the 80s.

These baby chickens who'd never seen anything before,

had to choose between a stuffed bird and a stuffed bird

that was all jumbled up. Remember, this is the 80s.

Everyone's on cocaine.

This is what science was back then.

Anyway, the chicks didn't mind the jumbling

as long as there was an intact face. Like this one was on par with a normal bird.

But this one was just a bit too much.

And you might be thinking: if pigeons can get into a bird with a beak

where its eyes should be, it's probably not so visually sophisticated.

All right.

So let me ask you, which one of these is a picture of breast cancer?

You don't know, but you can train a pigeon to tell you.

Turns out they have sensitivity to patterns and visual relationships

that's on some AI level s***.

And they're doing it with images they haven't seen before

at an 85 to 90% level of accuracy.

And that's not all.

Pigeons can make children cry... with science.

Some pigeons were trained to discern good children's art from bad

children's art, which apparently had to do with how realistic the drawings were.

Again, the pigeons did a great job

sparing parents the cost of sending their kids to art school.

You could have pigeon guidance counselors.

Check this one out.

You can teach a pigeon a bunch of words, some of them real words like “Bust”

and some of them nonsense. words like “Varn.”

You know, the pigeon gets a treat

if it pecks on the word that's real or the star shape if it's a made-up word.

Now, you start mixing in new words that the pigeons never seen before.

Both nonsense and real.

And you know what?

The pigeon’s able to tell which ones are real and which ones aren't.

They picked up patterns on what makes a word real.

You can’t bulls*** a pigeon.

And I'll tell you,

if you want invest, invest in the company that makes peck-proof screens

because the science hippies seem to use them quite a bit.

Here they got pigeons pecking color patterns in order

for peanuts or whatever they eat, and then patterns made out of shapes.

What is that? A book? A windmill?

Or in the words “PECK ME?”

Someone was having fun in the lab.

And here they are remembering patterns even after the shapes get covered up.

I mean, the bottom line is

they have some pretty sophisticated visual cognitive abilities.

Read, not dum dums.

I mean, their brain is about the size of a walnut,

but it's jam packed with neurons - more than twice the density of our brain.

But it has to process a lot of information.

They have 2 highly sensitive areas of fovias in each eyeball

compared to our one, and they have a field of vision that covers 340 degrees.

Compare that with the zero degrees covered by a dead pigeon

and you need those kind of peepers if you have falcons chasing your a**

from all directions.

And it helps with navigation, especially from above.

You try telling a Walmart from an IKEA just based on the shape of the roof.

Let alone finding the exact park bench where that crazy

pigeon lady is strewing morsels of stale hot buns.

But you can release

some pigeons 40 miles away from home in a place they've never been, and

they can find their way back before dinner.

So how do they do that?

One more recent theory is that they create little molecules in their eyes

that interact with Earth's magnetic field so they can kind of see

Earth's magnetic field. And that works day or night.

I mean, if they've got that, it's a little less impressive.

A big “Fly this way” sign in the sky.

I mean, I'd take back those war medals

the pigeons got. It’s bulls***. It’s Varn.

You don't puke in my mouth no more.

It don't drag its tail on the floor.

I think this pigeon love is gone.

I think this pigeon love is over. Pigeon love. We’re getting s*** on from above.

Pigeon love. We’re getting s*** on from above.

You don't puke in my mouth no more.

It don't drag its tail on the floor.

I think this pigeon love is gone.

I think this pigeon is over. Pigeon love.

We’re getting s*** on from above.

Pigeon love.