Why India needs to rethink its love for pigeons

When Dr Bobby Bhalotra meets a patient with a persistent dry cough and breathlessness and no other symptoms, he first asks them about their occupational history. Are they farmers or involved in the poultry business? Do they work with soldering or in the cotton or fabric industry? If the patient answers in the negative, the Delhi-based pulmonologist asks: do they have pigeons in their balconies, on their air conditioning units or in shafts in their buildings? Do they, perhaps, frequently feed pigeons?

Often, Bhalotra finds that the patient has a history of exposure to the birds. His medical team then conducts a test to check for possible damage to lung function. They also do X-ray or CT scans that can reveal any patches on the lungs, and a blood test that confirms if the patient has been exposed to various agents, including fungus, moulds, dampness of walls and pigeon droppings.

When the medical investigation reveals permanent damage to the patient’s lungs, the disease is more often than not hypersensitivity pneumonitis, also known by the name bird fancier’s lung, which uses a term for bird enthusiasts. The disease causes lung scarring, tightness in the chest, shortness of breath and prolonged cough.

Hypersensitivity pneumonitis “is not an infection but the way the body reacts to certain allergens or chemicals that are present in pigeon droppings, which stimulates the immune response in the body and particularly impacts lungs”, said Dr Vivek Singh, director of pulmonology and lung transplant at Medanta, Gurugram.

Bhalotra, who is vice chairman of the department of chest medicine at Sir Ganga Ram Hospital and has been practising for the last 30 years, said that in urban areas like Delhi, “we have seen an increasing trend of such cases being associated with pigeons”. In July this year, the hospital treated an 11-year-old with the disease, found to have resulted from prolonged exposure to pigeon droppings and feathers.

A rise in the number of these cases should not be surprising: the 2023 State of India’s Birds report found that between 2000 and 2023, the population of pigeons in India has increased by more than 150% – the highest percentage increase of all the birds whose populations went up. The report says that the pigeon has “successfully adapted to live in human habitation to nest on human structures, and to feed on whatever humans provide”.

In Delhi and other cities, it is common to see pigeons being fondly fed grains on traffic islands and footpaths, and also kept as domestic birds.

“People tend to like pigeons because they get domesticated easily, and keep returning to the person who feeds them grains,” said a pigeon seller in Chandni Chowk’s kabootar bazaar, or pigeon market. “No other bird gives that kind of loyalty.” He added that many also equate the act of feeding with “punya ka kaam”, or a good deed.

Most doctors and health professionals, on the other hand, see the birds as pests. “Pigeons are sometimes called flying rats,” said Dr Abi Vanak, director of the Centre for Policy Design at the Bengaluru-based ATREE. “If humans are artificially increasing the population through feeding, which is creating problems for other people, then clearly one cannot argue that the feeding can be equated with doing good.”

Scientists like him believe that the best way to tackle diseases linked to pigeons is by spreading awareness about them, in the hope that this leads to a change in human behaviour contributing to the increase in pigeon population. Such a broader approach, referred to as a “one-health approach”, is grounded in the understanding that human health is closely connected to the health of animals and the shared environment.

“Currently, we are still looking at one health as an intersection of veterinary and human health,” said Vanak. “When actually, the ecology side is just as important, to understand the disease-causing organisms and the vector of the disease, and how it fits into broader environmental interactions.”

However, conversations that Scroll had with pigeon sellers and buyers, and members of residents’ welfare associations in Delhi, showed how hard it could be to resolve the contradictions inherent in humans’ interactions with the birds.

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Every morning around 8 am, Rajkumari walks to the inner circle of Connaught Place in New Delhi with a bag containing about 5 kg of bajra and maize. She sits among sellers of sunglasses, jewellery and caps, to sell the seeds at Rs 20 per plate for those who wish to feed the pigeons just metres away in one of the parking lots. By 12 pm, most of her seeds are over.

“In villages, there are farms from where pigeons can forage for grains, in cities, where will they eat? They stay hungry,” said Rajkumari, who is in her forties and goes by one name. She added that while many buy grain from her, some drive up early in the morning with their own sacks of grain to spread over the parking lot.

Rajkumari’s concern for the birds is misplaced. While the country’s rising population and rapid urbanisation have led to elevated pollution levels and temperatures, which have become key stressors for many bird species, pigeons have been relatively unaffected owing to several factors: for instance, that they nest in buildings, reproduce through the year rather than only in some seasons, and that they are frequently fed by humans.

“The original habitat for this pigeon we see in the cities was rocks and nooks of caves,” said Anil Sarsavan, a senior programme manager and ecologist with the Foundation for Ecological Security. “Now in urban areas, they have become highly adaptive to concrete and buildings which offer them a safe hiding place.” He added that earlier, natural predators to pigeons, like raptors and snakes, controlled their populations effectively, but that as the populations of these animals reduced with urbanisation, pigeons started thriving in cities.

The 2023 State of India’s Birds report suggested that the increased availability of food in urban areas “can result in the increase of behaviourally dominant species such as house crows and feral rock pigeons”. This then results in these birds “crowding out other species”.

Through this process, people have developed a “confused sort of relationship” with pigeons, said Vanak. “Every year, we waste thousands of kilograms of grain grown for human consumption to feed pigeons, which in turn causes us harm since they are implicated in a host of airborne and respiratory diseases,” he noted. “There is some sort of dissonance in this relationship.”

Vivek Singh also agreed that pigeon feeding is keeping the population high, and has led to them becoming the most common bird that can cause these diseases. “This problem is going up particularly in urban areas with high rises,” he said, referring to the easy habitat that tall buildings offer to pigeons. “Once we do have the connection between a historical exposure to pigeons, we advise patients that pigeons should not be coming in their balconies.”

Despite the well-established risks of proximity to pigeons, people continue to not just feed them in public, but keep them at home, sometimes in large numbers.

On a September morning, the Charitable Bird Hospital in Delhi’s Chandni Chowk was busy, and Haravtar Singh was occupied with a long queue of patients – one person had brought in an ill parakeet in a tote bag, another had brought an injured sparrow wrapped lightly in a cloth, and many had brought in pigeons in cages.

One young man brought in a white pigeon, carrying it in his bare hands with an ease that suggested he had been handling the birds for years. “I have over 100 pigeons,” he said, as he deposited the pigeon in a cage – it would stay in the hospital till it recovered. He explained that the pigeons lived in his family’s terrace in Daryaganj, which was exclusively available to the birds. The family spends about Rs 1 lakh every year on their bird feed, he said. On being asked why they feed the pigeons, he smiled and said matter-of-factly, “We are Jains” – one of the religion’s fundamental principles is that all living beings are sacred.

Just about a kilometre away from the hospital is Old Delhi’s thriving pigeon market, where narrow lanes are lined with shops of caged pigeons of different varieties. As you approach on foot, the faint smell of pigeon droppings fills the air, before you begin to hear the soft cooing of hundreds of birds. Salim, who owns a shop that sells birds, explained that pigeons, which are Rs 150 each, are the most popular among the birds he sells, which include parakeets and lovebirds. He and his helpers clean the cages every day – they remove the trays at the bottom of the cages, which are lined with newspapers, dispose of the paper, and then line them with new sheets.

A customer at another shop noted that it was important to be careful about the risk of transmission of diseases from the pigeons to humans. Madan Singh Rajput had travelled about 10 km from his home to buy 15 pigeons from the market, adding to his collection of around 300. “Every three-four days we go to the terrace to clean it properly to stay away from illnesses and foul smell,” Rajput said, who reared pigeons simply because he enjoyed doing so.

He explained that special care had to be taken during the monsoon months, which is when pigeons shed their older feathers and develop new ones to prepare for winter. “During this time, there are very small feathers like those around their neck, which humans can accidentally inhale,” Rajput added. “We either wear a mask or cover our noses with handkerchiefs.”

Salim, however, did not see any reason to wear a mask to protect himself. “It looks like only educated people get these diseases! We have been doing this work in close exposure to birds for years and have not contracted it,” he said.

A few shops down the line, another old shopkeeper was aware of the diseases, but claimed that they did not present a serious problem. He scoffed and said, “Many more people would be impacted by air pollution than such diseases.”

Doctors, however, know that the sellers’ exposure to pigeon droppings can make them vulnerable. They noted that by the time such individuals realise that symptoms of lung diseases are developing, it is often too late to treat them effectively. “The problem is that the lungs are big organs and some amount of lung function has to be lost before people start being symptomatic of the disease,” Dr Vivek said.

Identifying the disease and those at risk also requires policy makers to incorporate “the social determinants of vulnerabilities and risk.” Referring to pigeon rearers, Shreelata Rao Seshadri, director of the Bengaluru-based Ramalingaswami Centre on Equity and Social Determinants of Health, part of the Public Health Foundation of India, suggested that “There should be a mechanism that their voices get recognised and there is flexibility in programmes to accommodate” their experiences.

Experts agreed that the easiest way to start tackling the problem of diseases caused by pigeons would be to stop the practice of public feeding, which would naturally lead to a decline in their population to a level more in balance with other ecological factors, such as populations of other birds. But they concede that it is a challenge to discourage people.

In a South Delhi apartment complex, a residents’ welfare association addressed the challenge somewhat indirectly. Three families in the complex fondly fed pigeons on their balconies, but the association was concerned about the droppings that fell on the ground floor of the apartment. “We told those families that some of the seeds are falling on the ground and attracting rats,” said the association’s secretary, who requested anonymity. “Had we said that the pigeons themselves are causing trouble, they would have never agreed.” The families then stopped the feeding.

In Mumbai, the question even reached a civil court. Two residents of a Worli apartment argued that their upstairs neighbour was “creating nuisance” to occupants of the building by feeding birds with water and grains from their balcony. The upstairs neighbour maintained that what they were doing was not illegal or criminal. But the complainants argued that “the mad rush of pigeons” was leading to “bird droppings falling on the window sliding and the channels creating foul smell and odour”. They alleged that one of them already suffered from a skin ailment, and that bird droppings on the awning above a bedroom had “further aggravated the same and caused rashes and itching”. Further, they said, insects had bred as a result of the filth created by decayed food grains and water.

The court ruled that while the feeder was performing a “compassionate deed”, they had to ensure “that such an act should not cause nuisance to the human beings”. It ordered that the upstairs resident was “hereby restrained permanently from feeding the birds from their balcony and creating nuisance to the Plaintiffs”.

The debate has also played out in some places in Delhi, such as Mandakini Enclave, a Delhi Development Authority complex in the locality of Alaknanda.

“Doctors that reside in our colony have often objected to people feeding pigeons and have explained how this causes several respiratory diseases and makes senior citizens and children particularly vulnerable,” said Mohinder Satpal, the security in-charge at the colony, and also a resident.

But Satpal explained that he and others involved in managing the complex had limited powers in the matter. “See, we cannot stop people,” he said. “Some have religious sentiments attached.” But, he added, the residents’ welfare association had taken a strong stand against making it easier for people to feed pigeons, “like creating a separate platform, something that has been requested by some residents in the past”.

Satpal also pointed out that since the colony was developed by the Delhi Development Authority, all the parks within the residential area fell under the Municipal Corporation of Delhi. “This means that we cannot really make any rules against feeding of pigeons in the parks, we can only request the people,” Satpal added.

Elsewhere in the country, authorities have tried to take firm measures to tackle the problem. The municipal corporations of Thane and Mumbai, for instance, have introduced penalties of up to Rs 500 on people who feed pigeons in public places. Delhi, however, has faced challenges with implementing measures to address the problem. In recent years, the municipal corporation has attempted to stop feeding in traffic islands by placing grills around them in some places, only for the grills to be ripped out by bird feeders. In one such traffic island near his locality, the residents’ welfare association secretary said, a guard had been appointed specifically to discourage pigeon feeders, and potted plants had been placed on the platform to avoid feeding. Both measures proved unsuccessful.

Experts pointed out that this issue needs to be addressed through high-level policy, and not through efforts at the level of individuals or residents’ welfare associations.

“It has to be within a realm of policy,” said Vankak. “If it’s a public health issue, then the health department has to take care of it, as should the municipal department.” Recent media reports suggest that the Municipal Corporation of Delhi is considering a plan to shut down public feeding spots across the city.

In cases where exposure is unavoidable, careful and consistent cleaning of areas frequented by pigeons is essential. At the bird hospital, which also houses injured and sick birds temporarily till they recover, cleaning staff move around with masks on. Haravtavar, the vet, explained that just before cleaning cages, the staff first wet the surface to avoid the dry droppings from becoming airborne, and then use a broom to scrape them off.

Spreading awareness of the need for such measures, however, remains a challenge. Vivek explained that most people remain ignorant of the fact that pigeons can cause lung disease. Even today, he said, “Most people are a little surprised when we ask if they have pigeons in their home or balconies.”