Some people love them, some people hate them. We found an amazing sample of the former in the southern suburbs of Paris.

As I tried to cut a path though the cages without stepping on too many seeds or bird poop, a menacing metallic sound made me cower, my shoulders hunched up to my ears. I froze. “Watch out! She hates women.” At the back of the room, not two meters away, a carrion crow frantically flew back and forth between the ceiling and the tops of two cages. In my hand, the shoebox I had been reluctantly carrying started vibrating and emitting muffled, desperate sounds. The wounded pigeon inside wanted to get out. So did I.

Most people hate pigeons. They defecate on your car, head, and windowsill. They bill and coo pathetically for hours, late at night, scraping the tin roof with their claws. They are ugly and dirty. They want your food when you sit en terrace, and they fly right into your head.

Yet, some people love them. Against adversity—the police, their neighbors—they surreptitiously drop crumbs and leftovers that they’ve collected at street corners, disappearing before the gathering flock gives them away. Sometimes, they can’t resist. Passersby circumvent these old ladies (and they are usually old ladies) with ecstatic smiles, their arms held aloft like tree branches covered with pigeons and sparrows and love.

The concierge in my parent’s building is a bit like that, although younger and more guarded. When she gave me direction to the Society for the Protection of City Birds (SPOV), she entrusted me with the shoebox with air holes which held a pigeon with a wound in its neck. I overcame my repulsion, and the taxi driver’s suspecting look, when the box started to move. “It’s a bird,” I explained, using a euphemism for pigeon.

Nadia Fontenaille has no pity for such a ridiculous fear. A former painter from the legendary Montparnasse era, the 83-year old widow saw in the birds’ flight—“vertical, horizontal, symbolic, a link between the sky and the earth”—what she was trying to express in her own paintings and decided to “do something more concrete,” she explained making an energetic, boney fist.

Fifteen years ago, she sold all her furniture, books, carpets, and wares and entrenched herself in a tiny room with a few souvenirs. She turned the two-story house her grandparents had bought in Châtillon in the south of Paris into a bird shelter by sealing all the windows off with wire netting. Today, about 3,000 birds a year, mostly pigeons, pass through what used to be the Fontenailles’ living room, their bedroom, the library, the office…

The house resounds with unending cooing, cheeping, scratching, and the creepy “Papa! Papa!” perfectly pronounced by Youma, the previously-mentioned misogynistic crow. A heavy smell of dried corn and bread, freshly crushed or defecated, fills the rooms. Tiny feathers hover just above the floor. Hundreds of cages and cartons are pilled up against the walls, under the cold fluorescent light. In the big leafy garden behind the house, 15 aviaries shelter hundreds of pigeons, sparrows, magpies, robins, seagulls, ducks…

Nobody knows exactly how many pigeons live in Paris. Most sources put the numbers around 100,000, about one bird for 25 humans. Besides the regular city pigeons, which represent 90% of the pigeon population, Paris harbors ring doves (9%) and the rarer stock doves.

Until the end of the nineteenth century, city pigeons lived exclusively in private pigeon houses. During the siege of Paris by the Prussians in 1870 and 1871, hundreds passenger pigeons carried messages across front lines in and out of the capital. Throughout the next century, without major predators, the pigeons colonized the city, adopting vertical walls and outdoor train stations, which resemble the cliffs they originally inhabited as wild birds.

Like dog poop, pigeons have become an ongoing source of tension and a controversial item on the political agenda in Paris. In the arrondissements, mayors have made various attempts to reduce the bird population, from organized captures and killings to imposing fines of up to 450 euros. Exasperated citizens use rat poison. Bird lovers on the other hand lobby against what they see as cruelty and for long-term solutions.

Two years ago, a temporary truce was signed. The city of Paris decided to implement regulated pigeon houses of an amazingly old and efficient design: about two hundred pigeons are fed inside, the sick are treated, the houses are cleaned regularly, and only the first clutch is kept so couples have only one instead of six or seven broods a year.

There are about twenty such houses in the suburbs, but only three have been installed in Paris: two in the Luxembourg Garden and one in the Denfert-Rochereau RER station. The political interest and will to address the problem seem to have since vanished.

Meanwhile, Ms. Fontenaille and the few volunteers who work at SPOV refuse to let the birds down. From 7 am until late at night, they welcome sensitive citizens—sometimes firemen, sometimes even the police—who bring boxes with holes in it. They drop a check, sometimes a few tears, and, to Ms. Fontenaille’s anger, disappear way too quickly.

The resolute old woman, conservatively dressed in a perfect black dress (except for the bird droppings on her shoulder) is a stern judge: “The older I get, the less I like human beings. They are the worst of nuisances, they even destroy themselves.” Vets, not to mention politicians, are in her line of sight. She thinks most of them are “stupid and worthless.”

SPOV, which counts 2,000 members and gets no public aid, has its own operation and rehab rooms. The birds look really bad. Wounded, featherless, blind… One swirls endlessly, head back, its nervous system broken.

“We reject no one,” proudly asserted Ms. Fontenaille while pushing food inside the mouth of a pigeon held firmly on her lap. “We feed them—every three hours for the swifts—treat them, and every once in a while, we set free the ones that can fly. There are 700 handicapped ones that we keep until the end. Sometimes we get a few exotic ones. They are all treated the same: no bird has special privileges.”

Not even the three baby pigeons brought in a taxi by two well-dressed, panic-stricken women from the upper-class 16th arrondissement. Like the others, they will receive infinite care.
SPOV. 68 rue Gabriel Peri, 92320 Châtillon. 01 42 53 27 22. Membership fee: 20€/year.