How do you feel about pigeons? There are only three correct answers to this:

1. I LOVE THEM. I AM OBSESSED WITH THEM. PIGEONS ARE TREMENDOUS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
2. Look, I’m not that in to pigeons, but I have respect for them.
3. I don’t know how I feel about them, Sophie. That’s why I am here, reading this article.

If you are already in the first category, I imagine I’m not going to say anything you don’t already know. You probably have already read this important piece by Michelle Téa, and maybe you’ve already read this also-important comic that I made last year. Maybe you’re just here to have a downloadable PDF of this “Things Pigeons Can Do” poster. There it is. You can go now.

If you fall under categories two or three, or a fourth, unspoken anti-pigeon category, gather ‘round. Let me tell you a little bit about pigeons.

Pigeons can do a lot of human hang-out things.

It’s not like pigeons have to do human things, but they’ve historically been way nicer to us than we deserve. Humans have taught pigeons to play ping-pong, to race each other for sport, and become loyal friend that will return to your human self if you are willing and able to show them you care about them. This is really incredible, whereas humans are pigeons’ greatest predators. Frankly, we’re horrible to them, and they keep showing up for us.

Pigeons have fought in wars and saved lives.

The most famous war pigeon was Cher Ami, a male homing pigeon who delivered a critical message from an encircled battalion in World War I, even though he was seriously injured. (Yes, he did win a purple heart.) Because pigeons are so intelligent and loyal, many of them were trained as spies and messengers in early wars.

They continue to save human lives into the twenty-first century. Pigeons (who are fast, can fly, and have great eyesight) have been trained to to look for red or yellow life jackets in order to find people who have been lost at sea. And since they can perceive ultraviolet light surrounding a person in the water (!!!!!), there are experts who attest that pigeons are actually better than humans at making sea rescues.

There are 351 species of pigeons, and some of them are so beautiful your jaw is going to drop.

My personal favorite is the Victoria Crowned Pigeon, who is AS BIG AS A TURKEY and looks like it is going to the fanciest ball. I’ve seen one IRL at the Brookfield Zoo (and yes, I went to this zoo FOR THE SOLE REASON that I heard that they had this kind of pigeon), but it kind of broke my heart. This pigeon is too beautiful to be in a zoo. All pigeons are too beautiful to be in a zoo. All animals are too beautiful to be in a zoo. OK, moving on.

Pigeons used to carry our mail, and they still can.

I’m sure you’ve heard of messenger pigeons (and if you haven’t, um, Google it), but you might not know the extent to which pigeons can reliably text for you. Pigeons have been used to send messages at least as far back as the 5th century AD, and can carry up to 10 percent of their body weight. Pigeons used to carry the results of the Olympics to people who were sports-obsessed in a pre-mass-communication past.

The last official pigeon post didn’t close until 2004 (it was in India!), and some people still use pigeons to send messages.

Pigeons are great at science, math, and analysis.

It would take a whole book (and there are several) to properly dive into every STEM-y thing that pigeons can do, so here is a PARTIAL bullet-point list:

• They can do basic math.
• They can be taught complex actions and response sequences.
• They can tell the difference between an impressionist and an abstract expressionist painting.
• They can identify cancer cells better on average than cancer doctors.
• They can tell the difference between other individual pigeons, and between individual humans.
• They can recognize themselves in the mirror.
• They can make models.
• They can remember hundreds of individual images for years at a time.
• I once personally watched a pigeon place a plastic water bottle over a plastic spike under an overpass that had been designed to deter pigeons, and then the pigeon sat on top of the water bottle and ultimately built a nest behind it and raised its babies behind it.

Pigeons have literally mystical homing abilities.

Ready for this? Pigeons can find their way back to their own nests from 1,300 miles away. That would be like if someone plopped you down in Havana and told you to find your way back to your house in Chicago.

But that’s not all: pigeons can do this even if they’ve been flown to Havana in an airplane, while concealed in a black box where sight, sound, and smell are completely absent. You might know that birds know what direction north is because of a magnet in their brains, but “north” is not going to get you to Chicago. You’d need sight markers or smell markers or something like that in order to get from Havana to Chicago. In human terms, this would be like if you had only ever hung out at YOUR HOUSE for your WHOLE LIFE, and then someone put you in an airplane where you were unable to see, hear, or smell anything, and flew you to Havana, and gave you a compass, and told you to find your way back to YOUR HOUSE.

So, yeah. Human scientists don’t know how pigeons can do this. They really don’t.

Pigeons aren’t actually dirty.

Maybe you’ve heard that pigeons are dirty. That’s false. HUMANS are dirty, and pigeons are able to make use of some of our refuse to help them to survive. In fact, pigeons are incredibly clean and there is no research suggesting that they spread disease.

Furthermore, pigeon poop (or, if you want to get sexy about it, “guano”) was once quite valuable, as it acts as terrific crop fertilizer. In fact, people used to employ guards to watch over dovecotes (that’s a pigeon house humans used to make in order to “keep” pigeons, and you should read about them) so people wouldn’t come and STEAL THE PIGEON POOP.

Pigeons model loving relationships that make human love look like a first draft.

Pigeons mate for life and live in complex communities of multiple families, like little pigeon communes that could teach us humans a thing or two about how to get along.

In terms of what I mean about “love,” here are the last few panels from a comic I made for The Believer that explains it.

There’s more.

If you can believe it, this is just a scratching of the surface when it comes to pigeon miracles. A simple Google Search for “Things pigeons can do” yields thousands (!!!) of articles like this one with even more bullet points for you.

If you’re unconvinced, I feel like you didn’t read this article. Go back and read it again.

And if you’re STILL not convinced, let me ask you this: what can YOUR species do that’s so great? Oh! Y’all invented war, nuclear weapons, xenophobia, and global climate change? Cool. Cool.

(PS — I am a human and not a pigeon, and so I do love humans, too. But I don’t stan humans who don’t love pigeons.)

(PPS — I made a shirt of this! Buy one!)