🔗 Share this article

The plane battled through successive sheets of icy precipitation during the approach into the city. A sinking feeling filled me during the journey, intensifying as I shuffled through the airport. I was unhappy about returning to the city where I had been raised, after making a home on the other side of the world for what had felt like a an eternity.

After a few days, I ventured out to get a haircut. My thoughts was far away, lingering over an vast expanse of water, when I heard something smack into the sidewalk. I glanced down to see a pigeon on its side, splayed out, and convulsing.

The impact occurred just as schoolchildren were filing out from the local grade school and so within minutes a small chorus of children had assembled, accompanied by their mums and dads. This ring of confused faces peered down at the creature, not knowing what to do or say. The kids were more definitive: “Papa, she needs hospital, can we call an emergency service?” I slipped off my anorak, bent down and picked up the pigeon up into it. “Don’t worry, dear, the kind man will take care of her!” exclaimed one mum with a sense of relief. I had become the rescue vehicle for this pigeon that had just fallen suddenly, against its will, as I had a short time earlier.

I made my way home, arms ramrod straight, with the bird tucked safely inside the coat.

Unbeknownst to me that my on-the-spot decision to rescue the bird (the name I bestowed upon my new friend) would lead me to a community of city dwellers giving up significant amounts of time to provide not only rescue services for street birds but scans, recovery care, and even “avian physiotherapy”.

I found a small container for Belinda, lined it with an old T-shirt, and put her inside. Every short while, I’d lift the lid just long enough for us to share a momentary glance.

Those periods of common perplexity interrupted my desperate search for what to do from there. I phoned friends for advice and one suggested trying social media, where, to my amazement, I stumbled upon a local pigeon rescue group, and sent a request to join.

A Community Effort

Boasting thousands of members, the group operates on an anarchic system: someone in Manchester stumbles across an injured pigeon, a urgent post is published, then a comment section “evaluation” takes place. If the bird is judged in need of an X-ray, someone with a veterinary contact can arrange it; if it needs therapy, a “carer” will step forward to care for the bird.

Rehabbers each have their own carefully cultivated skills, whether it’s repairing broken wings or cleaning wounds. Their tremendous, collective effort for the pigeons of the city runs entirely on goodwill.

Belinda was promptly diagnosed with brain trauma, likely a head injury, and placed with a rehabber who would provide pain relief and a course of careful physio. We never discovered exactly what made her to plummet. I assumed the role of pigeon ambulance once more, boarding the light rail across the city with Belinda in a box on my lap so she could obtain the care she required.

An Unexpected Lesson

After finding this secret pigeon “support system”, I began to feel much better about being back in my city. I question any of the places I had called home while away could have anything even close. It also dawned on me that this was not the first time I’d been involved in a pigeon recovery: almost 20 years earlier I’d observed one plummet from the sky into the schoolyard of my old school. Again, children gathered around the bird, but only one – my friend at the time – had the courage to rescue it and take it to safety.

The friend in question has since been lost – one of a number of companions to die in the years before my departure from Manchester. I came to see that this had been a big part of what had made returning home so painful.

Feathered Support

Pigeons have a longstanding role as “emotional support” animals, especially in the North. Laborers started to keep the birds because they gave them company and an excuse to stare at the open air between long shifts of underground work. During the economic downturn, workers on the unemployment also found a distraction in pigeons, but keeping them was seen as a sign of “despair”.

Nowadays, pigeons are often written off as simple, dirty or a pest. Before finding the rehab group, I had called a animal doctor, who told me: “if you bring that here, leave it in the lot and we’ll end its life.”

It? Not our Belinda. Although not expected to ever fly again , she has embraced her newly land-based life with grace in a volunteer’s home. Each satisfied coo, often elicited by her favourite food, vegetables, feels like a lesson in perseverance and strength – and I am eternally thankful to her for revealing to me a different facet to the city I thought I knew.