The artist Mickey Roberts only wanted to record a casual video while walking down a New York street, but the pigeons had other plans.
In the recording, he can be seen walking along calmly until dozens of pigeons begin to approach, as if they had secretly agreed to block his path.
The young man wrote on his social media: “Only in New York can you get kicked off the block because of a flock of pigeons. What did I do to make them hate me?”
And although it sounds like a joke, there is a real reason behind it. Urban pigeons have learned to live extraordinarily close to us. Studies on these birds show that they tolerate a person coming much closer before deciding to flee and that they can even learn to distinguish between humans who feed them and those who scare them away.
The city also offers them exactly what they need: buildings that serve as substitutes for the cliffs where their ancestors nested and a huge amount of food associated with human activity. In fact, experiments in other major cities have shown that when the food available to pigeons decreases, their abundance can also decline considerably.
In other words, Roberts wasn’t entering the pigeons’ territory: they probably already considered that sidewalk part of their home, even if that territory is the sidewalk you also want to walk down.