1928: GAY-NECK: THE STORY OF A PIGEON by Dhan Gopal Mukerji, with illustrations by Boris Artzybasheff
The city of Calcutta, which boasts of a million people, must have at least two million pigeons.
Look, when you scan through the list of Newbery winners, one title jumps out immediately, and not just because it's near the top of the chronological list. There has only been one author, in the century-long history of the medal, brave enough to write the saga of the gay pigeon who defeated the Kaiser.
Gay-Neck: The Story Of A Pigeon is a laughably bizarre odyssey of an Indian pigeon drafted into service as a messenger during the first World War, but Mukerji can’t stop himself from repeatedly singing the praises of the humble pigeon generally and Gay-Neck specifically, “thou soul of flight, thou pearl of pigeons”, described as though I’m hearing from the Humbert Humbert of birds. So the first half of this essay will just be my favorite over-the-top absurd passages. Like this one about his other name!
“...the other pet that I knew well was a pigeon. His name was Chitra-Griva; Chitra meaning ‘painted in gay colours,’ and Griva, ‘neck’ - in one phrase, pigeon Gay-Neck. Sometimes he was called ‘Iridescence-throated’.”
Or this one about how the pigeon became a pacifist!
“When he was about three weeks old, an ant was crawling past him into the pigeon-hole at whose entrance he was sitting. Without any instruction from anybody he struck it with his beak. Where there had been a whole ant now lay its two halves. He brought his nose down to the dea ant and examined what he had done. There was no doubt that he had taken that black ant for a seed, and killed an innocent passer-by who was friendly to his race. Let us hope he was ashamed of it. Anyway, he never killed another ant the rest of his life.”
Or this one which leads into the multiple multi-chapter passages in the book where the narration shifts to first-person, as in first-person from the pigeon’s point of view!
“...in order to see those things clearly and continuously, it would be better to let Gay-Neck tell his own Odyssey. It is not hard for us to understand him if we use the grammar of fancy and the dictionary of imagination.”
Or this one about the glory of pigeonhood!
“‘Did you tie his wings? Could he fly?’ I asked. ‘His wings were tied,’ he answered. That struck terror to my soul. I said: ‘Oh, you brother of a camel and cousin of an ass, instead of running hither, you should have sought for him in your own neighborhood. Do you not see that he tried to fly, but since his wings were tied, he fell off your roof? And by now he has been killed and devoured by some cat. Oh, this is a slaughter of a pigeon. You have robbed mankind of his diadem of carriers! You have murdered the glory of pigeonhood!’”
Or this one about how pigeons, even in war, serve their families first!
“...I knew that a pigeon whose wife and new-born children are waiting at home rarely fails to return. That bond of love between Gay-Neck and his family assured me that he would do his work of carrying messages very well. No sound of gun-fire, nor bullets, as long as he lived, could keep him from returning home at the end.”
Or this passage, narrated by Gay-Neck himself, about the moral affront of his tail being shot at!
“Just then a shot pierced and broke my rudder. Half of my tail was burned and torn away from me. And you know that made me furious! My tail is my point of honour. I can’t bear it to be touched, let alone shot at.”
Or the incredible aerial acrobatics that Gay-Neck descibes as he dodges a hail of Axis gunfire:
“There was no doubt now that all the sharpshooters and men in the trenches far off were taking a shot at me. But I zigzagged, circled, tumbled, and in fact did all the stunts and tricks I knew to cheat the ever-augmenting swarm of bullets, but all that zig-zagging business lost me time.”
And, though Gay-Neck is shot at again during this episode, he recovers, but not before delivering this line that made me laugh for about two full minutes:
“They kept me at the pigeon hospital for a month.”
But nothing can prepare you for the dark turn that the book takes towards the end as we get into discussions of pigeon eugenics, as Gay-Neck convalesces:
“I received Ghond’s letter. ‘Your Gay-Neck,’ he informed me, ‘should not nest yet. If there are eggs, destroy them. Do not let them hatch under any circumstances. A sick father like Gay-Neck - diseased with fright - cannot but give the world poor and sick baby pigeons. Before I close, I must say that I am better. Bring Gay-Neck soon; the holy lama wishes to see you and him’...the day after our departure my parents destroyed the eggs; for we did not want sick and degenerate children who would grow up to shame the name of Gay-Neck.”
Yes, let’s be careful to preserve the integrity of the name ‘Gay-Neck’ (fka ‘Iridescent-Throated’) and bear children worthy of the name.
So, Mukerji’s writing is ridiculous, but he didn’t make this story up out of nowhere; carrier pigeons were, really, used to carry messages throughout the Great War. Mukerji grew up raising pigeons, and his understanding of and affection for these filthy disgusting birds are genuine. And there’s a pretty not-subtle message in the book about war generally, delivered, again, by pacifist pigeon Gay-Neck himself:
“Now, tell me this: Why is there so much killing and inflicting of pain by birds and beats on one another? I don’t think all of you men hurt each other. Do you? But birds and beasts do. All that makes me so sad.”
It is, truly, very sad that we butchered each other so horribly in the war. It is sadder that we’re still butchering each other. But I’m still not going to trust a pigeon to win a war, or to be a prophetic moral voice. I would even trust a pigeon to drive a bus.
Obviously, Gay-Neck has a historical foundation, but the most accurate depiction of pigeons in literature is, of course, Don’t Let The Pigeon Drive The Bus!, the 2003 Caldecott-finalist picture book by Mo Willems, which Willems has since adapted into a musical stage show for the Kennedy Center. If you have young children, or had young children at any point in the past twenty years, you probably already know who Mo Willems is; he’s a revered children’s author who has put out multiple finalists and winners for the Caldecott (the Newbery for picture books) and Geisel (Newbery for early reader books) medals. His most famous works are the brilliant and hilarious Elephant and Piggie series. Before writing children’s books, Willems also had a long career writing for television - notably for Sesame Street but I always like to point out that he also wrote for Nickelodeon’s cult-favorite animated sketch series KaBlam! - and it shows in his sense of joke structure and his most famous books essentially functioning like giant storyboards, driven by word-bubbled dialogue and minimalist setting and character design.
The premise of Don’t Let The Pigeon Drive The Bus! is very simple: the bus driver has to step away for a minute, and he just asks you to make sure the pigeon doesn’t get to drive the bus. And then the pigeon asks if he can drive the bus, growing more insistent with each page turn. The pigeon is annoying and loud and awful and your kid, as she’s reading the book, is supposed to get laughs out of repeatedly saying ‘no’ to the pigeon. I love it. Pigeons are stupid and gross and it’s good that we are teaching our children to make fun of them.
However, it appears that pigeons may not, actually, be stupid. In fact, as Mukerji anticipated with his novel almost a century ago, pigeons may, objectively, be the most intelligent birds on Earth. I am gathering this from a 2011 peer-reviewed study published in the journal Animal Cognition1, which the scientists literally titled “Let the pigeon drive the bus: pigeons can plan future routes in a room”.
The scientists at Animal Cognition were not literally advocating for letting pigeons drive buses2. But this 2011 study was about pigeon responses to what scientists call “the traveling salesman problem”, basically a way of testing whether an animal is capable of planning an efficient route where they have to make multiple stops along the way. I have worked as a literal traveling salesman before, and part of my job was planning ahead for which customers to visit when, so that I was minimizing my travel time and spending the most time at the customers where I could get the most return for my time. Humans do this all of the time, you do it when you plan your errands on Saturday mornings, but it represents planning capabilities that are only possible with a highly developed level of cognition. Specifically, your ability to change your route if circumstances change - you need to pick up something extra, or you need to stop for gas, or there’s an accident on the highway so you need to take side streets - that’s very high-level thinking, that sets you apart from most of the animal kingdom. Now, apes can do this too (although I don’t mean to take away from your ability to plan your errands, that’s still very impressive), and the way you test this with apes is that you set up a habitat with multiple places to stop for food, and see how they plan their routes through the habitat.
So, can birds do it? Well, we only have evidence of one bird ever coming close to doing this. As the scientists wrote in Animal Cognition:
“It remains unclear whether or not the decision process of animals other than non-human primates utilizes rigid rule-based heuristics, or whether non-human animals are able to flexibly ‘plan’ future routes/behavior based on their knowledge of multiple locations. We presented pigeons in a One-way and Round-Trip group with TSPs that included two or three destinations (feeders) in a laboratory environment. The pigeons departed a start location, traveled to each feeder once before returning to a final destination. Pigeons weighed the proximity of the next location heavily, but appeared to plan ahead multiple steps when the travel costs for inefficient behavior appeared to increase. The results provide clear and strong evidence that animals other than primates are capable of planning sophisticated travel routes.”
So a pigeon may not be able to physically drive a bus, but it looks like the pigeon could handle the number 6 Jackson Park Express reroute down Balbo during Lollapalooza weekend3. It is possible I am being too harsh on pigeons, whom I disparaged as “filthy” and “stupid” and “Gay-Neck” as recently as several paragraphs ago. I don’t think Mukerji’s novel is particularly strong, but without his rapturous 200-page paean to pigeonhood, I never would have dug deeper to find out just how smart our feathered former allies in the trenches truly were. The world is bigger than I think, and I am not alone in it. I have pigeons.
Newburied is a series by Tony Ginocchio on the history of the Newbery Medal and a whole bunch of other stuff related to it. You can subscribe via Substack to get future installments sent to your inbox directly. The next installment will cover the 1946 medalist, Strawberry Girl by Lois Lenski.
I’m not a subscriber to Animal Cognition and the PDF would have cost me $35, so I’m pretty much just extrapolating from the abstract here.
How would they even reach the pedals.
I don’t care how inside that is, I wanted you all to read that joke.