Where the Hell Are All the Baby Pigeons?
A mystery hiding in plain sight—along with a French dinner reservation you didn’t ask for.
Baby pigeons are the Bigfoot of city birds. You see their crusty, overconfident parents waddling around train stations like they own the place—pooping on statues, strutting like they’ve got a 2 PM with Scorsese—but the babies? Ghosts. Never seen. Like an unopened bar tab in Vegas.
Truth is, they’re real. They’re just holed up in the avian equivalent of a rent-controlled walk-up with blackout curtains—nests tucked into rooftops, bridge beams, and broken HVAC units. And they stay there for weeks, growing into full-sized, street-smart birds before they ever touch pavement. Step out too early, and they risk becoming lunch for one of the city’s resident hawks or peregrine falcons—skyborne assassins that can rip through a fledgling faster than you can say “bodega bagel.”
For the record, pigeons hatch in about 18 days, shack up in the nest for a month, and in New York, if they dodge rats, trucks, and toddlers with loose morals, they can live up to 6 years—sometimes more. The city’s rocking an estimated one million pigeons, which is why the city even has a pigeon birth control program. Because in a town that never sleeps, neither do the birds.
Baby pigeons are called squabs, and in France, they’re a delicacy—roasted, drizzled with sauce, and served with an attitude. Leave it to the French to turn a flying dumpster rat into a 4-star entrée.
You don’t see baby pigeons for the same reason you don’t see the cook crying behind the kitchen door of your favorite dive bar—it’s all happening, just out of sight. So the next time one gives you side-eye on a subway platform, remember: that bird’s a survivor, born in the shadows, dodging talons and traffic, and still here to steal your fries and judge your outfit.