Up Close and Personal With Urban Wildlife

Nathanael Johnson once ate a pigeon turd—he plucked it off his sweater, mistaking it for a cookie crumb. He quickly recognized his mistake, and started retching in a subway station. “After that, things weren’t so cool between the pigeons and me for awhile,” he writes in his new book, Unseen City: The Majesty of Pigeons, the Discreet Charm of Snails, & Other Wonders of the Urban Wilderness.

But Johnson seems to have gotten over it. The other day, the author and journalist challenged me to take a closer look at a flock of pigeons bobbing around New York City’s Madison Square Park. “Do you know what color pigeons’ eyes are?” he asked me. I didn’t. I looked over at some of the birds pecking at the pavement. Their eyes were garnet red, flecked with orange. “They’re like flames,” says Johnson. “They’re kind of metal.”