The Oldest Company We Keep

This special episode of Talons of Hope—a podcast typically dedicated to the majestic "masters of the sky" like kestrels, hawks, and falcons—shifts its focus to a bird often dismissed as mere prey: the pigeon. For World Biological Diversity Day, we are exploring why the pigeon is actually the "oldest company we keep," a partnership that predates nations and many of our gods.

In this episode, we delve into the profound history and modern paradox of our relationship with these birds:

• A 3,500-Year-Old Bond: New archaeological evidence from Hala Sultan Tekke in Cyprus reveals that by 1400 B.C., pigeons were already living in our kitchens and eating the same grains and vegetables as our ancestors. This bone chemistry finally confirms the ancient link between pigeons and Aphrodite, the goddess of love, who is traditionally depicted with a pigeon in her palm.
• From Partners to Pests: For millennia, pigeons served as messengers, sources of fertilizer, and beloved companions. We specifically bred them to be dependent on us, only to rebrand them as a "nuisance" and "abandon" them following the Industrial Revolution.
• The "Beautiful Mess" of Conservation: This special explores the theme of "Acting Locally for Global Impact" by contrasting the heartbreaking loss of 3 billion birds in North America with recent "jam-side-up" wins, such as the record-breaking 8,000-species day for citizen science and the recovery of the kākāpō in New Zealand.
• A Call to Notice: Ultimately, we discuss how "leaning back in" to notice and feed the birds around us is a 3,500-year-old act of local conservation that still defines what kind of company we want to be.

If you like this episode of Talons of Hope, please don't forget to subscribe and also subscribe to my Substack: Jam Side Up — of birds, belongings and a beautiful mess.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:04

Hey everyone, welcome to a special World Biodiversity Day edition of Talons of Hope. I'm your host, Munir Varani. This year's theme is Acting Locally for Global Impact. And I want to start by looking at a bird that we usually only discuss as prey. I'm sitting on a balcony in Abu Dhabi having a cup of Kenyan coffee, and I'm watching a pair of kestrels that are hovering over a half-finished building. As they land, a group of pigeons erupts from the other side. In the world of raptors, we often see pigeons as nothing more than a food source. But they are actually the oldest company that we use. New archaeological findings from a site in Cyprus called Halasultan Teke have just confirmed something remarkable. Isotope analyses of 157 pigeon bones proves that as far back as 1400 BC, these birds were living in our kitchens and eating the same grains and vegetables as our ancestors. For three and a half thousand years, pigeons have been our partners. They've been our messengers, sources of fertilizer, and even sacred companions of the goddess Aphrodite. So to help us unpack this deep history and the modern, beautiful myths of bird conservation, I've brought in a specialized research team to provide a deep dive overview. We'll be exploring how we went from seeing these birds as gods to branding them as pests. And how today's citizen science is helping us lean back in to our relationship with the avian world. Let's listen. Oh, I guarantee it.

SPEAKER_01 2:07

Right. Maybe you were like rushing to work, holding your coffee, and it was just there on the sidewalk, uh pecking at a discarded French fry or something.

SPEAKER_02 2:17

Just completely invisible to you.

SPEAKER_01 2:19

Exactly. You probably didn't even really look at it. You might have even muttered, rat with wings under your breath, and just stepped around it. But uh what if I told you that the common city pigeon, that exact bird you just ignored, is actually a relic of the oldest company humanity has ever kept.

SPEAKER_02 2:37

It is honestly a remarkable blind spot. I mean, we look at them purely as pests today, completely forgetting that for well, most of human history, they were essentially human infrastructure.

SPEAKER_01 2:48

Aaron Powell Okay, let's unpack this because the way we treat pigeons today, it's honestly like okay, imagine you have a childhood best friend.

SPEAKER_02 2:55

Right.

SPEAKER_01 2:55

You grew up together, you relied on each other, you basically forced them to move to the big city with you to work for your family business.

SPEAKER_02 3:01

Which is a lot of pressure.

SPEAKER_01 3:02

Yeah. And then one day, just because their clothes got a little ragged from the city living, and you know, you bought a new machine to do their job, you just pretend you don't know them when you pass them on the street.

SPEAKER_02 3:12

It's pretty brutal when you put it like that.

SPEAKER_01 3:14

It's wild. And that dynamic is really the central mission of our deep dive today. We are exploring our ancient, contradictory, and deeply entwined three and a half thousand-year relationship with birds.

SPEAKER_02 3:28

And to do that, we are synthesizing some really fascinating source material. We have a beautifully written Substack essay titled Jam Side Up of Birds Belongings in a Beautiful Mess, a recent New York Times article on a uh groundbreaking archaeological discovery in the Mediterranean, and a curated digest of recent avian news from the Avian Archive.

SPEAKER_01 3:48

And when you put these sources together, they force a very, well, a very uncomfortable realization about ourselves. They really do. We have this incredible capacity to deeply revere the natural world while simultaneously engineering its destruction. And to understand how we got to this point, we kind of have to look at the origins of that childhood best friend we abandoned.

SPEAKER_02 4:08

We have to rewind.

SPEAKER_01 4:09

Yeah. To a time when pigeons literally sat at the feet of our gods. So let's look at that New York Times piece about the recent study in the journal Antiquity. We are going to Cyprus, specifically to a late Bronze Age seaside settlement called Hala Sultan Tech.

SPEAKER_02 4:25

Which dates back to around 1400 BC, just to give you a sense of the timeline.

SPEAKER_01 4:29

Right.

SPEAKER_02 4:30

And this was a major bustling hub for trade in the Mediterranean. I mean, they were doing business with Egypt, Turkey, the Levant. It was a massive cultural and economic melting pot. And at this site, researchers found 157 pigeon bones.

SPEAKER_01 4:46

Which doesn't sound like a lot at first.

SPEAKER_02 4:49

No, but the lead researcher, Anderson Carter from the University of Groningen, he didn't just catalog the buns. The team wanted to know the exact nature of the relationship between these birds and the humans living there. So they used a technique called isotope analysis.

SPEAKER_01 5:02

I found the mechanics of this absolutely fascinating because it's it's essentially chemical time travel.

SPEAKER_02 5:07

That's a great way to put it.

SPEAKER_01 5:08

Right. Because if you just look at the shape of a bone, a wild pigeon and a city pigeon look pretty much identical. So to figure out how these specific birds lived, Carter's team analyzed the carbon and nitrogen isotopes trapped inside the bone matrix of uh 37 of these specimens.

SPEAKER_02 5:25

And the underlying principle there is that you are what you eat down to the elemental level.

SPEAKER_01 5:29

Literally.

SPEAKER_02 5:30

Yeah. Different types of plants and proteins leave very specific isotopic ratios as an animal grows. For instance, carbon-13 ratios differ significantly between wild, uncultivated plants and domesticated crops, like wheat or millet.

SPEAKER_01 5:45

Right, the stuff humans were growing.

SPEAKER_02 5:47

Exactly. Meanwhile, nitrogen-15 isotopes accumulate as you move up the food chain. So an herbivore has a lower nitrogen 15 signature than a carnivore, or say an ondivore eating meat scraps.

SPEAKER_01 5:58

Ah, okay.

SPEAKER_02 5:59

By reading those ratios, you can build a highly accurate menu of what that animal consumed over its lifetime.

SPEAKER_01 6:05

And the isotopic signatures of these haliculton tech pigeons showed a diet heavy in cultivated grains, vegetables, and crucial here, scraps of meat.

SPEAKER_02 6:14

Right. They weren't just eating seeds.

SPEAKER_01 6:15

No. These birds were not out in the wild foraging. When the researchers compared the pigeon bones to human bones from other late Bronze Age sites in Cyprus, it was a perfect match.

SPEAKER_02 6:26

A one-to-one match.

SPEAKER_01 6:27

Yeah. The pigeons were eating the exact same diet as the humans. They were in the kitchens, scavenging the streets, just living off our tables. The researchers even found bones from nestlings, which proves they were breeding inside the settlement.

SPEAKER_02 6:41

Which really paints a picture of intense proximity. But we have to ask how that proximity started.

SPEAKER_01 6:46

That's the big question.

SPEAKER_02 6:48

Right. A zoarchaeologist at the Cyprus Institute, Angelos Hajakumis, notes that the line between domestication and colonization is incredibly blurry here.

SPEAKER_01 6:57

And here's where I want to push back on the traditional historical narrative that we like masterminded this relationship.

SPEAKER_02 7:04

Okay, go for it.

SPEAKER_01 7:04

Looking at human cities, you know, all that stored grain, the protective walls, the safe nooks and crannies in our architecture that perfectly mimic a cliff face for a nest, did we purposefully go out and domesticate these birds? Or did pigeons just look at human settlements, say free real estate, and essentially colonize us?

SPEAKER_02 7:22

It's a fair question. But what's fascinating here is that the isotope data actually challenges the idea that this was purely a passive opportunistic colonization by the birds.

SPEAKER_01 7:32

Really? How so?

SPEAKER_02 7:33

Well, if they were just scavenging, we wouldn't see the specific context in which these bones were found.

SPEAKER_01 7:37

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 7:38

Many of these pigeon bones were burned and discovered in what archaeologists call feasting deposits.

SPEAKER_01 7:44

Feasting deposits.

SPEAKER_02 7:45

Yeah, these are sacred ritual spaces filled with fine ceramics and cookware. It implies a lot more than just, you know, eating trash.

SPEAKER_01 7:52

Which brings in the mythology.

SPEAKER_02 7:54

Precisely. Cyprus is the mythic birthplace of Aphrodite. In ancient depictions, she is almost always shown with a pigeon or a dove perched on her hand. Wow. And Carter points out that these burned bones in the feasting deposits suggest intentional breeding for ritual sacrifice. We weren't just letting them eat our trash, we were actively integrating them into our spiritual economy.

SPEAKER_01 8:16

We brought them into the temple.

SPEAKER_02 8:18

Yes. We changed their entire ecological niche, bred them to be dependent on us, and over centuries turned them into vital infrastructure. We use them for a reliable food source, harvested their guano for fertilizer, and eventually utilized their homing instincts as a critical communication network.

SPEAKER_01 8:37

The messenger pigeons.

SPEAKER_02 8:38

Exactly.

SPEAKER_01 8:39

They carried our communications through wars across empires. We built our early modern world on their wings. And then uh came the Industrial Revolution. We invented the telegraph.

SPEAKER_02 8:50

Everything changed.

SPEAKER_01 8:51

We figured out how to synthesize fertilizer from the air with the Haberbosch process. We industrialized our agriculture. And suddenly the pigeon was completely obsolete.

SPEAKER_02 9:01

We didn't need them anymore.

SPEAKER_01 9:02

No, we broke the contract, we left them stranded in the concrete cities we built, and then we branded them a nuisance for having the audacity to survive in the exact environment we designed for them.

SPEAKER_02 9:11

That historical abandonment is exactly what makes our modern relationship with them so fraught. We severed a three and a half thousand-year-old alliance. But what the Substack essay Jam Side Up captures so beautifully is that the alliance isn't entirely gone.

SPEAKER_01 9:26

No, it's really not.

SPEAKER_02 9:27

It is still happening right now in the R above us, if we just pay attention.

SPEAKER_01 9:31

The author of that essay paints an incredibly vivid scene. They are sitting on a balcony in Abu Dhabi on the eve of World Biodiversity Day. They are holding a cup of cold Kenyan coffee, completely captivated by a half-finished building across the street.

SPEAKER_02 9:48

I love this imagery.

SPEAKER_01 9:49

It's so good. Working the sky above the concrete are two kestrels' birds of prey, just hovering perfectly still in the heat. And the moment the kestrels drop down and settle onto the concrete, five pigeons instantly take off from the other side of the same floor.

SPEAKER_02 10:03

But the kestrels don't chase them.

SPEAKER_01 10:05

No.

SPEAKER_02 10:05

And the pigeons don't migrate away. They just fluidly share the space. Yeah. The author writes, the building holds them both the way the city does, the way the world has, for longer than any of us can quite imagine.

SPEAKER_01 10:15

It's such a grounding observation, and the essay references a book by Stephen Moss, Ten Birds That Changed the World. The first chapter is the Raven, the Bird of Omens, but the second chapter is the pigeon. Moss makes a case that you cannot unsee once you read it. They are our oldest partners.

SPEAKER_02 10:32

They really are. Yeah. And if we look beyond the urban pigeon, we find that the human capacity for interspecies partnership is not just an ancient relic, it is a living, breathing practice.

SPEAKER_01 10:42

Oh, absolutely.

SPEAKER_02 10:43

The Avian Archive Digest highlights the Mozambique Honey Guides, which offers a profound counter narrative to how we usually interact with nature.

SPEAKER_01 10:51

I was reading through that digest, and honestly, the mechanics of the honey guide partnership sound completely made up.

SPEAKER_02 10:57

Like a fairy tale?

SPEAKER_01 10:58

Yeah. It's not domestication. Nobody is trapping these birds or like training them with clickers. In Mozambique, human honey hunters walk into the wild bush and use a very specific trill, a specialized call passed down through human generations.

SPEAKER_02 11:15

And the bird responds.

SPEAKER_01 11:16

The wild honeyguide bird hears the call, answers back with its own specific chatter, and literally leads the humans from tree to tree until they find a hidden wild beehive.

SPEAKER_02 11:25

It's incredible.

SPEAKER_01 11:26

The humans use smoke to harvest the honey, and they leave the beeswax behind for the bird, because the bird can digest wax but can't easily break into the hive alone.

SPEAKER_02 11:34

And the biological mechanism driving this is fascinating. This isn't a genetically coded behavior in the birds. Research suggests it is culturally transmitted among the local honeyguide populations.

SPEAKER_01 11:48

Wait, really? Culturally transmitted?

SPEAKER_02 11:50

Yeah. They learn to associate that specific human call with a successful foraging outcome. It is a shared, cross-species language developed in the wild without any coercion.

SPEAKER_01 12:01

It's like realizing you have a mild, feathered dinosaur living in your backyard that has been actively negotiating a trade agreement with you for centuries. They just show up for the shift.

SPEAKER_02 12:11

They do. And stories like the honey guides and the howl of Solden Tech Pigeons, they force a paradigm shift. They prove that humanity's default state isn't inevitably observing nature from behind a pane of glass or just exploiting it until it collapses.

SPEAKER_01 12:24

We have another gear.

SPEAKER_02 12:25

Exactly. Historically, we have the capacity to actively participate in a shared ecosystem.

SPEAKER_01 12:30

So what does this all mean? Because that brings us to the sharpest turn in our sources today. If we have this capacity for profound partnership, how do we explain the terrifying crisis point we are currently in?

SPEAKER_02 12:41

That is the dark side of the coin.

SPEAKER_01 12:42

We are living in a moment of unprecedented citizen science victories paired with horrifying, accelerating ecological losses. Let's look at the wins first, what the Substack author calls the Jam Side Up News. On May 9, 2026, global birders mobilized and logged over 8,000 species in a single day.

SPEAKER_02 13:02

A new world record.

SPEAKER_01 13:03

Yeah. It's a planet-sized data collection effort driven purely by civic enthusiasm.

SPEAKER_02 13:08

The scale of that engagement is just astounding. And we are seeing incredibly focused, localized conservation successes as well. The avian archive highlights the recent situation in New Zealand with the Kakapoo.

SPEAKER_01 13:20

Wait, the Kapu, is that the uh the giant flightless parrot that looks kind of like a mossy owl?

SPEAKER_02 13:25

That's the one. It's a nocturnal ground dwelling parrot. In the 1990s, the entire species was down to just 51 individuals.

SPEAKER_01 13:31

Well, 51.

SPEAKER_02 13:32

They were functionally at the absolute brink of extinction. But due to an incredibly intensive hands-on conservation effort, this past breeding season resulted in a baby boom of 105 chicks. Every single one of them was monitored, weighed, and protected.

SPEAKER_01 13:46

We literally hand-raised an entire species back from the ledge. And we are using immense technological power to do this kind of work, too. The archive piece mentions cities utilizing birdcast radar technology.

SPEAKER_02 13:59

This is such a cool development.

SPEAKER_01 14:00

I always thought migration tracking was just like people with binoculars, but Birdcast actually uses the national weather radar network.

SPEAKER_02 14:09

It's an ingenious repurposing of existing infrastructure.

SPEAKER_01 14:12

Right. The algorithms powering the weather radar can distinguish between the radar signatures of water droplets in a rainstorm and the biological mass of a flock of birds.

SPEAKER_02 14:22

Which is mind-blowing.

SPEAKER_01 14:24

So they filter out the weather and suddenly you can forecast massive continent-wide bird migrations in real time. When the radar shows the night sky is going to be thick with millions of birds passing overhead, participating cities automatically dim their skyline streetlights.

SPEAKER_02 14:39

Which saves countless lives.

SPEAKER_01 14:40

It prevents the migrating birds from getting disoriented by the artificial light and crashing into skyscrapers.

SPEAKER_02 14:45

We are also mapping their history with unprecedented clarity. The Cornell Lab of Ornithology just released a phylogeny explorer that maps the entire evolutionary family tree of all 11,000 known bird species.

SPEAKER_01 14:59

It is essentially Ancestry.com for the sky.

SPEAKER_02 15:02

Pretty much.

SPEAKER_01 15:03

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 15:03

Anyone with a smartphone can trace the DNA lineage of a city sparrow back through millions of years of evolutionary divergence. We have never possessed more knowledge about avian biology or cared more visibly about their individual survival than we do in this exact moment.

SPEAKER_01 15:18

There is a massive shadow over all of this data. The avian archives pulls the thread on the darker reality happening right underneath those technological winds. Since 1970, North America alone has lost three billion birds.

SPEAKER_02 15:32

Three billion.

SPEAKER_01 15:33

And a new study shows that decline is actually accelerating.

SPEAKER_02 15:36

The mechanism behind this loss is primarily the expansion of industrial farming. It isn't just a matter of buildings taking up space, it is the systemic alteration of the landscape.

SPEAKER_01 15:46

How exactly does farming wipe out three billion birds? Because you know, people usually think of farms as open land, which seems like it would be fine for birds.

SPEAKER_02 15:53

It comes down to the concept of monoculture and chemical application. Modern industrial farming removes the hedgerows, the brush, and the transitional zones where birds actually nest and hide from predators.

SPEAKER_01 16:05

Yeah, they just flatten everything.

SPEAKER_02 16:06

Right. Furthermore, the widespread use of neonicotinoids and other pesticides collapses the insect food web. Even seed-eating birds rely heavily on insects to feed their chicks because the chicks need dense protein to grow.

SPEAKER_01 16:20

Ah, I didn't think about the chicks.

SPEAKER_02 16:22

Yeah. When you eradicate the insect population across millions of acres of farmland, you starve the next generation of birds right in the nest.

SPEAKER_01 16:30

The Substack author points out the terrifying historical precedent for this kind of rapid decline. The passenger pigeon.

SPEAKER_02 16:37

A classic, tragic example.

SPEAKER_01 16:38

In the 19th century, flocks of passenger pigeons used to literally blacken the sky over North America for days at a time. There were billions of them. People treated them like an infinite, inexhaustible resource. And through relentless commercial hunting and deforestation, we wiped them out entirely.

SPEAKER_02 16:54

Completely gone.

SPEAKER_01 16:55

The last one died in a zoo in 1914. One human lifetime was all it took to erase the most abundant bird on the continent.

SPEAKER_02 17:03

And when you remove or alter species at that scale, the ripple effects cause ecosystems to behave in really unpredictable ways. The archive notes a disturbing situation currently unfolding in Patagonia. Pumas are slowly returning to their historic coastal ranges after decades of being pushed out.

SPEAKER_01 17:21

Which usually would be a conservation win.

SPEAKER_02 17:23

Right, but the ecosystem they're returning to is not the one they left. These pumas have suddenly started hunting mainland penguins.

SPEAKER_01 17:29

Penguins that evolved entirely without land predators, they have like no defensive instincts for a large cat.

SPEAKER_02 17:35

None at all. In just four years, researchers estimate the pumas have slaughtered 7,000 adult penguins. It is an ecosystem violently rewriting itself because the old rules of predator and prey just no longer apply. The balance has been fundamentally broken.

SPEAKER_01 17:50

I need you to help me reconcile this because it feels like ideological whiplash. How are we the exact same species that will meticulously hand raise 105 kapo chicks, name every single one of them, monster their weight daily, but simultaneously wipe out three billion other birds through systemic agricultural practices without even blinking?

SPEAKER_02 18:11

It's a jarring contrast.

SPEAKER_01 18:13

Are we just obsessing over saving these specific charismatic individual species to make ourselves feel better while completely ignoring the fact that we are chemically paving over the foundation of the entire food web?

SPEAKER_02 18:24

If we connect this to the bigger picture, that paradox is arguably the defining feature of the Anthropocene, the age of human impact. The Substack essay captures this dual nature perfectly.

SPEAKER_01 18:35

How so?

SPEAKER_02 18:35

The author writes that we are the exact same species that puts the pigeon on the shoulder of a goddess and the one that paves over the field where the metalark used to sing. Both things are true at once. We are capable of profound localized empathy and catastrophic systemic blindness. We can revere the concept of nature while destroying its actual mechanics.

SPEAKER_01 18:53

We are still the species that puts a pigeon on the shoulder of a goddess. That line brings this entire deep dive directly back to you listening to this on your Tuesday commute. It forces the question: what is the actual utility of all this information? The Substack author mentions the UN's World Biodiversity Day theme: acting locally for global impact.

SPEAKER_02 19:14

Let's be honest, that sounds like a dry, focus grouped corporate slogan.

SPEAKER_01 19:18

Totally. But look at it through the lens of the deep time we've been discussing today. Acting locally isn't a new corporate initiative, it is the oldest human story there is. Three and a half thousand years ago, acting locally looked like leaving a handful of cultivated grain on a Bronze Age shore in Cyprus for a wild bird, beginning a partnership that built early civilizations.

SPEAKER_02 19:38

Today acting locally looks like a city planner relying on birdcast radar to turn off a streetlight in Manhattan so a migrating thrush doesn't hit a window.

SPEAKER_01 19:47

Exactly. Or it looks like logging a bird call on your phone on a Saturday in May to help scientists track population shifts. The unifying theme of that essay, and really of all these sources, is that our best, most sustainable moments as a species happen when we notice the birds, we fed them, we let them in, we actively participated in the ecosystem.

SPEAKER_02 20:08

The tragedy always begins when we stop noticing. When the coffee goes cold on the balcony and we don't even see the kestrels and the pigeons negotiating the airspace above the unfinished building.

SPEAKER_01 20:18

We are still deciding what kind of company we want to keep on this planet. We've been making that decision every day for three and a half millennia.

SPEAKER_02 20:25

And that raises a profound question to leave you with. One that sits right at the intersection of Cornell's phylogeny map and those pumas rewriting the food web in Patagonia. We tend to view this current mass decline of three billion birds purely as a tragedy, a final ending for these lineages.

SPEAKER_01 20:41

It's hard not to see it as an ending when you look at the sheer numbers. Sure.

SPEAKER_02 20:45

But ecosystems are incredibly dynamic. They are constantly rewriting themselves, and species lineages adapt to whatever environment currently exists, no matter how harsh. What if this current mass decline isn't a final ending, but a violent evolutionary bottleneck?

SPEAKER_01 21:01

A bottleneck shaping whatever comes next.

SPEAKER_02 21:03

Exactly. In another three and a half thousand years, what entirely new relationships will the surviving birds have forged with whatever our concrete cities look like then? Long after we are gone or changed beyond recognition, who will be the pigeons of our future ruins?

SPEAKER_00 21:21

It's a sobering thought when we specifically bred pigeons to be dependent on us, only to rebrand them as a nuisance and essentially abandon them after the Industrial Revolution. As researcher Anderson Carter notes, we changed their entire ecological niche. We owe them at least some respect. Our relationship with birds today is nothing more than a beautiful mess. On one hand, we're the species that has overseen the loss of three billion birds in North America since 1970. But on the other, we're the species that just saw birds. Log 8,000 species in a single day, and we're witnessing the best breeding season for the kakapo in New Zealand in three decades. We're also seeing cities dimming their streetlights for migration and honey hunters in Mozambique still calling out to wild honey guides in a language that predates history. The story, written into those 3,500-year-old pigeon bones, is simple. We noticed the birds, we fed them, and we let them in. As we celebrate World Biodiversity Day, we have to remember that acting locally starts with paying attention to the birds sharing our own urban towers. Three and a half thousand years into this partnership, we're still deciding what kind of company we want to be. Thank you for listening to Talons of Hope. For more on this story, please subscribe to my Substack Jam Side Up of Birds, Belonging, and a Beautiful Mess. Thanks to Kieran of Vision Aquila for putting this show together. Have a great World Biodiversity Day.