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Bill Brown

A complicated man.

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I was eating lunch at Baja Fresh today, I had my usual nachos, and a pigeon walked up in its head-bobbing manner. Having an abundance of chips and feeling a beneficence for a fellow living creature—abnormal for me, especially, because I can’t stand pigeons and birds in general—I broke up a chip and cast it near. He proceeded to break it further against the sidewalk for easier processing and digestion and I was hooked. I gave him about three full chips over the course of twenty minutes as I alternated between pigeon observation and reading a Python book on my laptop.

That is, until a smaller bird, a sparrow perhaps, discovered the buffet. This bird had the audacity to scoop a large piece right out from in front of the pigeon, who was dutifully busting it up. The bird—a third the size of the pigeon—then flew away some distance to share the bounty with an avian friend. I was a little pissed at this thievery so I stepped up the pigeon’s allocation. The bird’s friend then swooped over to steal the new offering. WTF!

This has renewed my disdain for pigeons, specifically, and birds, in general. What kind of creature lets another much less powerful creature take away its food? If I were that pigeon, there’d be some sparrow bits in the offerings I left on car windshields.