Issue 04
THE PIGEON MUMBLER
By Caleb NeelonPhotos By Travis Roozee
Illustration By Ben Woodward
Forty years ago, Big Mike Alicea was Little Mike, skinny, and minus the tattoos on his forearms. He was 11 years old, staring out the plate glass window of his Bushwick classroom not two blocks from his current home. “I used to just stare out this window across the street, and there was this 15-year old boy up there all the time, and he kept pigeons in a coop on his roof. I finally met the kid, and I started spending all of my free time up there on his rooftop.
Later, I started playing hooky from school to go up there with that pigeon coop.” Of course, it isn’t hard to get caught playing hooky when you’re visible from the classroom. “My teacher used to come up to that roof and yell at me to get back in there.” His teacher’s efforts didn’t work: Mike was hooked.
Pigeon-keeping is a pastime in many parts of the world, but it has a special place in New York City’s outer boroughs. Come each May, the skies of Brooklyn fill with clouds of pigeons sent up by their keepers. The flocks move tightly in spirals, and though pigeons may individually be low on the order of beauty in the birding world, their movement in formation is an inspiring sight. With each tight turn, a different part of the bird presents itself to view, shifting color and giving an iridescent, morphing appearance to the hundreds of birds that fly together in flock formation. The flying birds are hypnotic, and they had young Mike so entranced that he began tending pigeons on his own rooftop. Mike wasn’t satisfied to keep just one or two, either. “By the time I got to be 15, I was holding down a thousand birds in my coops.”
So, how does a young teenager come to own a thousand pigeons? “Well, back then a lot of the guys that kept pigeons were old white men, Germans and Irish around here, and, well, they didn’t keep no locks on their coops,” Mike trails off a bit, smiling. “And the only people in those days that stole around here were Blacks and Puerto Ricans like myself.” Mike would run up to the old men’s rooftops, duck down into their coops, and hurriedly grab birds one after another, stuffing them into a laundry sack. He’d heave the sack off the side of the building, usually one of the three-floor walkups so common to Brooklyn, and walk out empty-handed. Collecting the sack at the ground level, he’d pull out the unlucky birds that broke the others’ falls and introduce the survivors to his coop.
Stuffing birds into a laundry sack is a crude way to play the game of keeping pigeons, but it generates the same result as a win by elegant means. Every pigeon-keeper is in competition with one another, and the goal of the game is to capture the pigeons of another keeper with a well-trained flock of your own. At the sight of a rival’s pigeons in flight, the keepers spring to action, releasing their own flocks. As the masses of birds converge, the keepers begin the process of coaxing their own flock-along with the opposition’s birds-back to their rooftop to be locked back up in their coop. Food is the bait, along with flags on bamboo poles, whistles, and vocal calls, though careful breeding and training play important roles as well.
After a round of flying, the keepers take stock, identifying the fresh catches, which the keepers call “prisoners” or “P.O.W.’s,” by the distinctive leg bands attached by the birds’ previous keeper. Mike’s current flock bears the tag “Mikey’s Outlaws: Eldert Street Rockers, 2005.” These bands, of course, turn into tiny trophies in the hands of the opposition. As the flocks come home, there is a flurry of gloating and “I’ll-get-you-next-time” cell phone calls among keepers. In the end, it’s all fun. “When we see each other on the street, it’s all ‘hey, what’s up man, how’s it going, go get breakfast together, get a drink, whatever.’ But when we’re up in the sky, it’s warfare!”
In the small yet perceptible Brooklyn pigeon-keeper community, Mike Alicea has reached “mumbler” status. To be called a pigeon mumbler by your keeper peers is an act of reverence, a bit like being called old-school. While the number of birds he keeps has fluctuated over the years, he’s forever fiddling with his coop and caring for the current birds in his flock. Whenever he moves, he needs to make sure that his landlord will not mind a new and, however harmless, probably illegal addition to the rooftop. Mike currently keeps a medium-sized flock of about 400 pigeons in a tarpapered wooden coop, similar in size to an average Manhattan shoebox apartment but with a slightly lower ceiling. Mike, at about 5’6”, can just stand comfortably inside.
Mike opens the door to the left-hand coop, revealing 200 fluttering, roosting, cooing, feeding pigeons. As Mike tosses them handfuls of corn pellets, barley, safflower, and peas, the pigeons spill out onto a sort of birdie veranda that he has just completed, an openair area surrounded with chicken wire. It’s late spring: big puffy male pigeons have one thing on their minds, and slender, ducking, females are entirely preoccupied with avoiding it. Scattering feed, Mike drops an ornithology lesson: “This breed here, with the longer beak, these are ‘flights.’ The ones in the other coop are ‘tiplets.’ Flights are different families from tiplets, you know. Just like a Puerto Rican and a white guy, we’re both human, but different kinds.”
Flights and tiplets are for flock flying, with the tiplets a slightly better bird for the game. Both breeds, however, pale in intelligence to the “homer’” or homing pigeon. There’s more money in homers, as their keepers will head out in club-sponsored competitions to places in Pennsylvania and New Jersey to release their birds en masse – the quick ones able to find their home rooftop the soonest can net their owner a prize of up to $50,000. Mike has a few homers, but he likes to breed them. His objective, as he explains, “is to get that tiplet body with a homer brain.”
Then there’s the ordinary street pigeon. To the mumblers, street pigeons are called “clinkers” or “rats,” and they’re a world apart from the carefully bred birds that they fly. Even the colombophilic Mike considers them a low breed. “Clinkers, man, they’re dirty birds, they eat cigarette butts, rotten food, whatever. They’re like a dirty, dirty bum who’s so dirty that he’ll get sick if he goes and takes a bath.” Clinkers are useless, says Mike, unless you’re extremely hard up for cash. If that’s the case, you capture a bunch of them in a sack and sell them to a shooting range, which will release them for target practice. A few social-climbing clinkers hang out around Mike’s coop, however. Perhaps they like the company, but they more likely prefer the food and the safety. Mike spends about $70 a week on his pigeon hobby, but that can easily double if he has to buy medicine to cure a sick pigeon before the others get infected.
As Mike stands by his coop, he looks out over his Bushwick neighborhood and takes stock of the competition. He points down the street, out behind high-rise projects, and, finally, eastward, in the direction of Williamsburg, where the stakes are high.
“Over there, that place is infested. Scarface, he got about 800. Billy, he got about 700. You go out that way to Williamsburg and them niggas will get you.”
Mike loves it up on the roof. Over the edge are the guys on the corner. Mike’s section of Bushwick is certainly years away from the gentrification that has occurred in neighboring Williamsburg, a bit closer to the neighborhood conjured in many rap songs. “In the summertime, this is the place to be. This is where I like to be. I’ve been down there and done all that street shit. It’s safer up here.”