Moreover, one of evolution’s stealthy physiological adaptations gives these birds’ advantages over humans in navigation. The use of homing pigeons in history has demonstrated the pigeon’s ability to migrate long distances, suffer reorientation and be stripped of visual cues and still find its way to a home base, pointing to an allocentric map use. The theory of magnetoreception in birds in brief stems from feral pigeons’ and most birds’ possession of deposits of the ferromagnetic mineral, magnetite, in their beaks, and cells. We see neuron action potential firing sky rocket in the trigeminal ganglion when one of the variables (direction, inclination, or intensity) in the magnetic field changes leading us to believe that these magnetic deposits link to the trigeminal nerve (Cadiou & McNaughton 2010). These neuronal firing patterns could with further study end up conceptually similar to place, direction and grid cells, that humans use but instead of being built on memory of auditory or visual sensation, be built on magnetic sensation. Now, if you’re questioning how this even stranger quality could humanize these birds, note that they share this sensitivity to the geomagnetic field with fish (which use single-domain magnetite in the cell soma) and other members of the animalia kingdom, and despite still being unsure of the inner workings of their magnetoreception, we may have gotten closer to finding the theorized hub of magnetoreception in humans through a flaw in their navigation—disorientation from light. Certain birds’ homing abilities malfunction when exposed to red or yellow-orange light (Cadiou & McNaughton 2010). In subsequence, scientists found a protein known as a cryptochrome behind the retina (common in many animals with magnetoreception, also found in humans) where they believe a chemical reaction is triggered in response to the magnetic field.

Now, for the flexibility of pigeon’s purely cognitive specializations, scientists have managed to train them in counting, word vs. non-word recognition and discrimination between good and bad art. Pigeons show the first and second signature of number cognition, but only Corvids demonstrate knowledge relating to the third signature number cognition by portraying understanding of water displacement by manipulating it to get a reward. Aside from having powerful visual abilities in the physiological sense (perception of far more colors than humans), birds can be trained to detect visual patterns and categorize new images from previously extracted information. This translates from the recognition of words in opposition to nonwords, where they detect orthographic signatures, and bigram frequencies (the reoccurrence of letters as pairs) and spacing cues (Scarf 2016). In the art scene, pigeons can use non accidental properties and metric properties to form connections of relativity between objects i.e. sameness or differentness. Just like the orthographic recognition, they can extract former patterns that were, say, associated with a Picasso, and recognize them in a new Picasso image (Brooks 2009). These discrimination tasks can only inform us so much on the natural object recognition in pigeons, but they do exhibit that with minimal training they can begin to understand occlusion, object persistence and identity (Dipietro 2002).

So, perhaps pigeon cognition is the key to training AI to correctly perform object recognition or discovering a sixth magnetic sense in humans or further corvid studies on voice mimicry will open new doors for AI’s vocal rendering. Regardless, these feral pigeons and doves have served man through wars and the crusades, and now in science, so I’d argue they deserve more consideration than they’ve been given in the cities we share.