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Pigeons prove that any transplant can become a native New Yorker
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Emily Lipstein
Published Mar 21, 2024
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Photo by ED JONES/AFP via Getty Images)
By
Emily Lipstein
Published Mar 21, 2024
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New to the city? So are pigeons, house sparrows, and squirrels — relatively speaking. Not all of the animals we see around the five boroughs evolved here, but many have adapted extraordinarily well to city life, making it difficult to imagine New York without them. What does it mean that some of our most iconic animal residents came from somewhere else?
Ecologists call these sorts of species “invasive,” “non-native,” or even “pests,” but these descriptors carry baggage with them, specifically because they require us to classify animals by their relationship to humans.
"I struggle with the ecological terms 'invasive' [and] 'pest,'” said Elizabeth Carlen, a postdoctoral researcher at Washington University in St. Louis. "Those are all just words that we're making up to decide where something should and shouldn't be. It's a pest because often it's in your house or in your backyard when you don't want it there."
Ecologists often describe species as invasive when they pose a problem for the survival of native species: These ‘new’ plants and animals might be outcompeting more local ones for resources like food and habitat. But this can obscure the origin of the problem. Since European colonization, humans have so drastically altered the landscape — from woodland to concrete jungle — that cities have transformed into entirely new ecosystems that require species to adapt.
“Cities themselves can exert strong selection on things like thermal tolerance,” explained Brenna Levine, an assistant professor at Kean University.
At the same time, urban areas have become biodiverse “islands” in a sea of strip malls, ornamental lawns, and farmland, allowing for an explosion of life in what may seem like an unlikely place. The fight against invasive species is as much a philosophical battle as it is a scientific one: How far is too far in negating the anthropogenic changes made to the ecosystem?
“As humans,” asked Carlen, “who gave us that power to decide how these things go?”
Here’s a closer look at some of the species that aren’t original New Yorkers, but have become part of our lives — for better and for worse.
Eastern gray squirrels
Technically speaking, the squirrels scampering in city parks and across phone lines are native to the New York region. Squirrels ran rampant on what eventually became the streets of Manhattan until European colonizers arrived and hunted them for food. Wild squirrels became so rare in the city in the following years that a single escaped pet drew a crowd of hundreds of onlookers to City Hall Park, according to one account from the New-York Daily Times in 1856.
We owe squirrels' modern presence in Manhattan to Frederick Law Olmstead and Calvert Vaux, who designed Central Park to be a urban slice of nature replete with plants and animals. Staff of the Central Park Menagerie – now the Central Park Zoo – introduced a small number of eastern gray squirrels, chipmunks and flying squirrels to the Ramble in 1877, and added more in the following year. The population soon ballooned to the point where the Menagerie's Director William Conklin began organizing squirrel hunts, much to the dismay of the public who loved feeding them.
The culling clearly didn’t work. In 1907, the New York Times reported calls to transplant some of the estimated 5,000 squirrels in Central Park to other city parks. By one count, the critters’ numbers have since diminished. In 2019, Squirrel Census volunteers counted 2,373 squirrels in Central Park.
Pigeons
Pigeons, also known as rock doves, have lived alongside humans for thousands of years. The birds' ancestors once thrived on the rocky cliffs around the Mediterranean before European colonizers eventually brought them across the Atlantic, likely as a food source. Before long, the focus primarily turned to breeding pigeons for entertainment, like racing or looking pretty, instead of food.
The advent of evolutionary theory in the 19th century inspired a craze of hobbyist breeders devoted to “perfecting” varieties of domestic animals. This eventually led to the formation of organizations with breed standards, like the American Kennel Club and the National Pigeon Association. As the author Stephen J. Bodio explains in a blog for the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, even Charles Darwin was an avid pigeon fancier, and used the birds as primary evidence in his 1868 book, “The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication*.*” These “fancy pigeons” were bred to have ostentatious features, like regal feather ruffs, fantails, and even curly feathers. While we don’t see pigeons that look quite like this strutting next to hot dog carts, they do come in a striking variety of colors and patterns.
These days, few people raise pigeons due to strict city regulations and the pricey real estate market. All of the pigeons we see now are the feral descendants of the ones once cared for by humans. Even after hundreds of years, pigeons aren’t found in woodland areas; they’d much rather stay near humans and their food waste. They’ve adapted well to living in a world of concrete (how different is it, really, from rocky cliffs?), and have even become a common meal for native birds of prey.
“You can literally think of your pigeon neighbors as your neighbors,” said Carlen, who studied the spread of pigeons across the Northeast for her doctorate at Fordham University. She'd repeatedly see the same individual birds in the same place over the course of her research. One study done using GPS trackers even showed that less than 7.5% of pigeons monitored in one European city traveled over 1.25 miles in a day. Carlen says it’s easy to understand why they’re such hyperlocal birds. “Why would you [leave] if you have mates, if you have your home, if you have a food source? Everything's right there.”
European starlings and house sparrows
There’s an urban legend that a fan of William Shakespeare released starlings — which are among the birds mentioned by the Bard — in New York City in 1890, introducing the birds into the United States. New research calls this story into question and reveals that starlings were introduced as early as 1872. But Andrew Farnsworth, a visiting scientist at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, still gives Shakespeare a supporting role: “This was apparently the introduction that stuck.”
House sparrows have a better-documented debut. All it took was 16 birds released in Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery between 1850 and 1852 to control an inchworm infestation. (It should be noted that this excess of inchworms was itself caused by the growing human population, which had reduced the bugs’ natural predators.)
Many of these introductions were done by the members of acclimatization societies, groups established in the mid-19th century that often functioned to give Europeans a taste of home in their overseas colonies.
“I think there is generally agreement that these introductions of birds at the hands of such societies played a huge role in defining North American biodiversity writ large,” said Farnsworth. He said that starlings and house sparrows are causing problems in greener parts of the city — like Inwood, and parts of Brooklyn and Queens — because they’re outcompeting native birds for limited nesting space in the cavities of trees.
Spotted lanternfly
According to Kristin Winchell, an assistant professor of biology at NYU, it only took 200-300 hideaway lanternflies on a stone shipment from South Korea to send New Yorkers on a bug squishing spree. The boldly patterned insects arrived in Pennsylvania in 2014 and have since spread to 17 U.S. states, generally by hitchhiking on cars and trucks. Lanternflies originated in China, but have seemed to thrive better in urban environments outside the country, including Seoul, Tokyo and now New York City. “The thought is that cities could actually cause an invasive species to become more invasive,” explained Levine.
Lanternflies have acquired a taste for at least 70 U.S. plant species. They suck the sap through tree bark, and cover the surface with a sticky waste called honeydew, which promotes the growth of a harmful fungus known as sooty mold. This can be a huge problem for local ecosystems and crops, like apple trees. In a global city like New York, said Levine, the main concern is making sure we don’t help the bugs spread any further: “The more you have, the easier it is that someone's going to accidentally transport it to a new location.”
A sign posted by the Connecticut Department of Transportation asking drivers to check their vehicles for spotted lanternflies.
Courtesy of Emily Lipstein
The campaign to stop the spread of spotted lanternflies in New York City has gone strong for the past three summers, but scientists are split on its effectiveness. “Who are we to say just because you came from somewhere else, you don't belong here, you don't deserve to live,” said Winchell. She says it’s probably more worthwhile to destroy their eggs. “Let's prevent them from...taking an ecological and economic toll by preventing future growth. But let's not unnecessarily kill things. I think it's just very uninformed to do that.”
Eastern wild turkeys and white-tailed deer
Staten Island is home to sizable turkey and deer populations. While both animals are native to New York state, their footprint in Staten Island has grown — perhaps a bit too much according to some of their human neighbors. The borough’s booming feral turkey population was started after a local released nine pet turkeys there in 1999. In 2023, the Christmas Bird Count noted a population of 160.
It’s a funny thing to imagine prehistoric-looking birds waddling down a New York City sidewalk, but that’s what’s happening on Staten Island. The birds, which have been known to roost in trees lining local streets and block traffic, have become a nuisance to Staten Island’s human residents.
The deer pose more obvious issues: They’re vectors for ticks, can carry diseases, and are dangerous and unpredictable road hazards. And since neither turkeys nor deer have any natural predators keeping their population down, residents and politicians have advocated for wildlife management policies to help pick up the slack.
Turkey eradication efforts stalled after a relocation program failed and the start of the pandemic followed. City and state officials suggested Staten Island residents should accept their new neighbors but recent comments made by Councilmember David Carr indicate a philosophical schism between politicians and government agencies on what needs to be done. “[The DEC indicated] that the turkeys were kind of a status quo that now needed to be accepted and I didn’t agree with that,” Carr told SILive.com.
The solution for managing deer on Staten Island has also been nonlethal. For the past six years, the city has organized a deer version of the controversial trap, neuter and return — or TNR — method of managing feral cat populations. It provides deer with vasectomies and tags the creatures to monitor their movement across the island. But the expensive project doesn’t come without its critics.
“Definitely not worth the plus-$4 million spent,” Cornell University professor Paul Curtis told the New York Times in 2020. “Deer culling would have likely shown measurable and significant declines in deer-and-vehicle collisions much quicker at a lower cost.”
In 2016, ads by the Parks Department popped up all over the city encouraging New Yorkers to learn to live alongside deer.
For now, these animals are here to stay, and awareness campaigns have adopted an ethos of coexistence. For deer, that means flashy ads on the side of MTA buses reminding commuters that New Yorkers “take many forms” and that they should refrain from feeding wild animals. But only the “neighborly love” part of the message made it to Mario Ariemma, the owner of an Italian deli on Staten Island, who told Hell Gate that he feeds day-old bread to the turkeys that stroll by his store. "I wouldn’t want to kill them. I wouldn’t want to eat one of them either. I consider them pets."
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Existing in New York City
Emily Lipstein
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