A new Arizona festival celebrates the wonders of the much-maligned pigeon

This Saturday marks the first-ever Pigeon Palooza in Snowflake, Arizona.

Pigeon Palooza is exactly what it sounds like: a festival of all things pigeon. It’s partly the brainchild of Phillip Fry, who runs a nonprofit called All About Pigeons. Fry says he originally became fascinated by pigeons when he started researching doves, and discovered that the birds we often call doves are actually a type of pigeon called the white homer.

Fry quickly found himself immersed in the world of pigeon-fancying, as it’s known in the birding world. It’s a time-honored tradition, and to learn more about it, Fry launched a podcast — also called All About Pigeons — where he interviews academics and fellow fanciers about a range of topics, like training pigeons for racing and performance, pigeons’ role in U.S. military history, and designing an ideal pigeon loft.

As Fry told The Show, he also began amassing his own flock of birds.

Full conversation

PHILLIP FRY: So, you know, I got the white homers, and then I got some regular like racing-style homing pigeons, and then I got into some fancy different breeds and stuff like that. There's so many different breeds. And when you start looking at the different breeds, some breeds just really call the people the way they look. … And the striking colors and stuff like that.

DINGMAN: Do you find that they have different personalities?

FRY: They really do. There's over 600 different breeds of pigeons and some people even say more than that. The way they come in different shapes and sizes, it's incredible. So you can find one that'll really stick out to you. And you know, because they breed so much and so fast that you can really control and pick certain traits and stuff. And, you know, you get some breeds that like the parlor rollers that roll on the ground or the Birmingham rollers that do somersaults in the air. It's really incredible.

DINGMAN: Wow. Well, I have in my notes here that you have a pigeon that does fortune telling. Is this accurate? 

FRY: Yeah, that's right. I've got him trained to a point now where I give him a command with a light and he can draw a fortune slip. And he drops it down a tube for us and we'd pull it out of the tube. So now we got a fortune-telling pigeon. Or if you have an event, he can also draw raffle tickets for you.

DINGMAN: That's fantastic. Does he have a name? 

FRY: Yeah, it's Gurkha, the fortune-telling pigeon.

DINGMAN: OK, all right. So pigeons are obviously a very maligned and misunderstood bird. There's a lot of people who hate pigeons. They call them “rats of the sky,” and all these things I know you're very familiar with. But one of the things that I know is important to you is talking about aspects of pigeons that a lot of people might not be aware of that might make them appreciate them more. And not just that Gurkha can help tell fortunes. For example, you've talked about the role that pigeons have played during wartime. 

FRY: Yeah, and that goes back, as long as we can go back and track down our written history. We're writing and talking about pigeons, even if it was just for an agricultural purpose of birds that will fly around, get their own food and water, and then you can have a source of meat and eggs. And then we start to recognize that homing abilities have a purpose in wartime for sending messages. My great uncle, Junior, he was actually part of the Pigeon Signal Corps. And he was one of the people that served and worked with the training of the pigeons. And there were 32 Medals of Honor given to pigeons. GI Joe saved over 1,000 people's lives just by being able to communicate a message to stop a bombing …

DINGMAN: GI Joe was the name of a pigeon, to be clear.

FRY: GI Joe was the name of the pigeon, yes. Yeah, and that was a pigeon that saved over 1,000 people in a city in Italy.

DINGMAN: Would you be able to explain for people who have maybe, you know, heard the phrase homing pigeon or carrier pigeon, and are kind of ambiently aware of pigeons being able to deliver messages. How does that actually work? What exactly are they capable of doing? 

FRY: It's kind of interesting really, because it's still kind of a mystery even today. And there's universities that have done all kinds of studies. They've put eye caps on the pigeons to see if it's a visual thing. … Is it a smell thing? The most common belief is that it's something to do with magnetic fields. However, they've also correlated during massive solar events that pigeons get a little bit more disoriented. But whenever the pigeon, wherever it's born, that's going to be its spot where it's always going to want to go back to. So even if you have a pigeon born in your loft and you try to move it around to different lofts, it's always going to want to kind of mess around and go back to that one loft, even if it's only 20 feet away. It's really peculiar about that.

So the original keeping of pigeons was they would build these big dovecotes, which were just kind of like structures made out of clay usually and stuff like this. And the pigeons would go and fly, and they would get their own food and water and come back. And then the pigeon fancers at that time would just harvest the squab for meat, and then they would get eggs and fertilizer for their fields. And so by recognizing that these pigeons would always home back, then they would just start recognizing that if I'm traveling and this guy has a dovecote, I have a dovecote, we would meet in the middle. I would give him some of my pigeons. I would take some of his. And then whenever we needed to communicate, they could just put a message on that pigeon and they could communicate because that pigeon would always fly back to that dovecote.

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DINGMAN: The pigeon would just know how to get back to the place it came from.

FRY: Right, mhm, yeah.

DINGMAN: So that's what homing pigeon means, is that the pigeon is going home?

FRY: Right, yeah.

DINGMAN:  And we don't understand how they're able to do that?

FRY: Yeah, there is no clear, concise agreement on it yet.

DINGMAN: What do you find are some of the reasons that people get interested in pigeons? 

FRY: There's kind of like two people that are into pigeons, and it's either, I would call it royalty, right? So you're born into it. Like your parents had pigeons, and their parents had pigeons, and it's a royalty chain. Or they got introduced to pigeons and it just clicks with people. When they see a pigeon, a fancy breed or whatever, they get to hold the pigeon or someone does a pigeon release and they get to see all these pigeons fly and learn about how they're coming back home. It really hits with people, and it just hooks them in. And when you get that pigeon bug, it's a really hard thing to shake, I'll tell you.

DINGMAN: Yeah, yeah. Well, you've also talked, if I'm not mistaken, about the way that pigeons can have sort of a calming effect. 

FRY: Right, yeah, absolutely.

DINGMAN: What do you mean by that? 

FRY: Yeah, it's definitely the cooing. The cooing itself, the pigeon cooing, that is a very calming effect. But when you're holding pigeons — if stressful day or I'm always angry and then I go to my pigeon loft, and then it just calms down. They have this calming effect. It's really hard to describe, but especially if you're in a big situation, like inside of a loft of pigeons and just surrounded by the cooing. And … they've been called the bird of peace for, you know, thousands of years. And maybe that's a big part of it.

DINGMAN: Right. I mean, doves, right? We think of doves as like the symbol of peace. 

FRY: Absolutely. Yeah.

DINGMAN: There's something very lovely about that. 

FRY: I mean, it's and so pigeons, they inhabit every continent except Antarctica. Like they are survivors. When it comes to balance with nature, like they find a way. Darwin, he loved pigeons. You know … his whole thing, you know, he gets misquoted a lot about survival of the fittest. It's survival of the most adaptable to change.

DINGMAN: Well, as a last question for you, Philip, at Pigeon Palooza, you're going to have this pigeon cooing competition. Do you have a pigeon cooing impression that you do? 

FRY: So my cooing isn't very good. So, what I do is that because there's a lot of different sounds that they make, actually. … This is my impression of a cock bird, like a powder cock bird approaching a female. So it'd be like a mm mm mm mm.

DINGMAN: Sounds recognizably pigeonesque to me.

FRY: Yeah, pigeonesque. That's what I was going for. I keep the bar low because, you know, I want to make someone else win that trophy.

DINGMAN: Well, Philip Fry is the host of the All About Pigeons podcast, the owner of about 150 pigeons of his own, and will be putting on Pigeon Palooza and Snowflake on Oct. 4. Philip, thank you for this conversation. 

FRY: No, thanks so much for having me on, Sam. I really appreciate it.