At quarter past seven one Saturday morning in the middle of the long, hot summer of 2018, a thousand or so racing pigeons were released from a car park in Thurso, mainland Britain’s northernmost town. Jon Day begins his book with the start of this race, and threads updates on the birds’ flight back to London all the way through it. He has skin in the game, or should I say pigeons in the race. A few years ago he bought his first two birds, Eggy and Orange, erected a loft in his back garden and became a “flyer”.
The Thurso Classic is his local federation’s final race of the season, and the longest. It’s 504 miles back to his house as the crow flies, but pigeons don’t fly like that. They follow the grooves and hollows of valleys and trace the route of major roads such as the A1, even going round the roundabouts and choosing the right exit. And they will do anything – flying very low over the sea, for instance, or skirting thick woodland – to evade hawks. Some will never make it back, picked off by those hawks, or throwing in their lot with feral pigeons they meet on the way.
Day’s account of their journey is mostly educated guesswork. Pigeons are faster than people and can’t be followed in real time. True, you can now strap mini-cameras and GPS devices to their backs, which he does once as research. But mostly his birds fly as “a rebuke to the known world, with its mapped and recorded limits”. He sees them as “emissaries, mapping the land they flew over on my behalf, beating its bounds with each flap of their wings”.
Day’s previous book, Cyclogeography, about his former life as a London cycle courier, was a richly rewarding account of a two-wheeled subculture, with its special way of reading the city as “a moving, zoetropic flicker of life”. In Homing, too, Day draws us into the esoterica of an unfamiliar world – one fixated on bird lineage, wind direction and the armchair cartography evoked by the names of liberation points such as Thurso, Berwick and Barcelona – and makes it inviting to non-initiates. Pigeon racing emerges as genially competitive and pleasingly arcane. The peer approval of master flyers, with nicknames such as “Woodo” and “Big Johnny Pigeon”, is much prized.
Towards these veterans Day deploys a tone of generous semi-detachment, wry but never snarky. In return they teach him a lot – such as how to give pigeons just enough food to sustain them on their journey and yet leave them hungry enough to head straight home. Or how to train them to break from the pack at the right time – a racing pigeon, like a cyclist in a peloton, flies more efficiently in a flock.
Day, an academic and literary critic, weaves in some lightly-worn learning on the lore and science of pigeons. I knew that Darwin bred pigeons and used them as evidence for his theory of evolution. I did not know that one of his publisher’s readers for On the Origin of Species, a cleric named Whitwell Elwin, dismissed it as “a wild & foolish piece of imagination” and advised the author to cut anything in it that wasn’t to do with pigeons. “Everybody is interested in pigeons,” Elwin wrote, trying to be helpful.
Everybody isn’t. The pigeon is not a glamorous bird. Ted Hughes, as Day points out, could never have written a poem called “The Pigeon in the Rain”. Day thus joins other nature writers, such as Mark Cocker (crows) and Tim Dee (gulls), in lavishing attention on an unloved and sometimes reviled bird. Like rooks and gulls, pigeons are what biologists called synanthropes: animals that live alongside humans. Day comes to admire their resilience, the “cocky, parasitic chanciness” that allows them to thrive cheek-by-jowl with us.
They are like us in another way, which forms the true subject of this book. Unlike most other birds, their navigational instincts are not linked to seasonal or environmental changes. Home for them is one specific location, which is why they are so good at finding their way back from Thurso car parks. Like us they are nostophiles: lovers of home.
Day begins his life as a flyer shortly after moving with his partner to their first house, in Leyton, east London. He recognises their good fortune in being able to afford even a small terrace house near a tube line at a time when the idea of home is in economic and geopolitical crisis. As they move in, London property prices are crazier than ever and Theresa May, then home secretary, is sending billboard vans all over the city warning illegal immigrants to “go home or face arrest”. Along a grubby stretch of the River Lea, people squat in rundown narrowboats or makeshift dens made from tarpaulin spread between trees. The graffiti sprayed on pylons reads “Give Us Homes”.
In the course of the book, Day’s two children are born. What, he wonders, can pigeons teach him about the value of making a home? As he learns more about their extraordinary homing instincts, he also learns, from the work of Gaston Bachelard, Martin Heidegger and others, about the human need for rootedness and belonging. The new nature writing can be fond of slightly pat epiphanies, those “I have come to see” moments in which the writer’s encounter with the natural world reconnects him with the human world and himself. Day manages this segue better than most.
The book climaxes with the end of the Thurso Classic. Twelve hours after the race has begun, flyers all over London wait in deckchairs in their gardens, hawk-eyed and ready to time in their birds with tamper-proof clocks. A pigeon race, as flyers say, has “one starting gate but a thousand finishing lines”. No spoilers, but this big-hearted and quietly gripping book has one very satisfying finishing line.
• Homing: On Pigeons, Dwellings and Why We Return is published by John Murray (£16.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
