The Misunderstood Birds That Inspired Me to Pursue My Dream

A record-breaking heatwave broils New York. The city sweats in tandem with the living world—delayed trains, broken air conditioners, cracking sidewalks. My curly fro rises like bread as I arrive disheveled for my shift at Wild Bird Fund (WBF), New York City’s only wildlife rehab center. While I squeeze my way through a crowd of feathers and feet, my coworker scurries by looking for a patient: “Chowder?”

Chowder is a pigeon nestling, smaller than my palm. We don’t know his age or where his parents are. We don’t even know if he is a he. What we do know is that Chowder was found starving and alone outside of Gramercy Park. He is emaciated and could die if not tube-fed every few hours. Chowder is just one of thousands we’ve treated this summer. 

Of the 13,000-plus patients WBF receives per year, roughly 7,000 are Rock Pigeons. It may seem peculiar that the staff devote so much labor to helping a species that many wrongly view as nothing more than pests or disease vectors. But the ironic reality of urban wildlife medicine is that the most common patients are the ones society wants to erase the most. 

And yet, despite their anti-glamour, they were the ones who inscribed the zeal for conservation in my heart. They were the ones who taught me that our city’s wildlife face similar challenges to those of everyday New Yorkers. They even inspired me to recommit myself to a once-deferred dream—becoming a veterinarian.

My veterinary ambition first bloomed when I was four, and it continued to blossom throughout high school when I worked as a veterinary assistant. I had planned to pursue the field in college, but my drive began to wilt during my sophomore year. As a Black woman, I rarely encountered people I could relate to, and I questioned whether pursuing an animal-care career meant sidelining my parallel passion for human justice. Frustrated and burned out, I changed my trajectory and completed a degree in visual media studies to create conservation art. Afterward, I pursued education on the human-animal interface in the Animal Studies graduate program at New York University.

And so it was that, a week after moving from Maryland to New York City, I discovered WBF. The world of birding was unfamiliar to me, but I was mesmerized by their website’s images of Red-tailed Hawks, Eastern Screech-Owls, and Great Egrets, so I immediately signed up to volunteer. Maybe I could see an animal like that up close one day, I thought. 

When the day came for my orientation last February, I suited up in my old scrubs and trekked to the Upper West Side, ignoring flocks of pigeons on the walk to the facility. Upon entering, I expected to be welcomed by the glamorous species that enthralled me online. Instead, I found the same ones I had just disregarded. 

WBF does treat charismatic animals like hawks, owls, and egrets, but I spent most of my time as a volunteer and staff member working with pigeons and other overlooked wildlife, such as Canada Geese and Mallards. Though I, too, once ignored these birds, I came to recognize what we have in common. In my search for rootedness as a person of color in the animal field, I saw how the challenges plaguing marginalized animals mirror the inequities affecting marginalized humans. It tied into an idea I learned about in graduate school, a concept called One Health that emphasizes the interconnectedness between human, animal, and environmental well-being.  

Take the toxic metal lead, which permeates our air, soil, and water. In Brooklyn, the threat of lead poisoning is concentrated in historically Black neighborhoods that are known as the “Lead Belt,” and poses significant risks to humans and wildlife alike. In fact, the first study to demonstrate that pigeon blood can serve as a “bioindicator” for lead poisoning in humans was conducted with data from WBF. Last winter a Mute Swan from Prospect Park arrived with blood-lead levels that were literally off the charts; the detector simply stated “HIGH” rather than a number. 

Disability challenges present another example of One Health. Like humans, some birds, too, are born with physical impairments. Last summer a WBF rehabber rescued a gosling in Brooklyn’s Gowanus neighborhood—infamous for its polluted canal—that was blind in her right eye and coated in tar. In hearing how she struggled to keep up with her family that lived in a Whole Foods parking lot, I was reminded of the hurdles disabled people face due to accessibility gaps in the city’s transit system.

Ultimately, working with misfit species at WBF taught me that human health inequities are mirrored in animals due to the wide-reaching impact of our biased infrastructure. Lead poisoning, disability barriers—these aren’t just obstacles for wildlife; they are injustices that have long plagued working-class people. It is easy for us to neglect the suffering of our animal neighbors, just as it is easy for elites to evade the struggles of the masses, yet it is palpable when you see it up close.

When I connected these dots, I noticed another distinct facet of WBF: Many of my coworkers were people of color. Across the United States, some 88 percent of veterinarians and 89 percent of animal caretakers are white, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. This imbalance creates a barrier for underrepresented minorities who could truly foster connections with the non-human world. Facilities like WBF offer a means to ameliorate this human-animal divide. 

One reason WBF attracts diverse demographics is that anyone can volunteer, no matter their experience level. “It was my first job,” says Antonio Sanchez, a native of Manhattan’s Washington Heights neighborhood and former animal care supervisor at WBF who now works as a zookeeper at the Bronx Zoo. “Anyone is welcome to come try and work with animals, so it was very accessible to me.” 

Sanchez started working in 2015 after a few months of volunteering. This was a time when many staff members were Black women. One of those women was Shannon Brathwaite from Canarsie, Brooklyn, who now works as a licensed veterinary technician at New York’s prestigious Schwarzman Animal Medical Center. Like Sanchez, Brathwaite also began as a volunteer before becoming a staff member. “It felt great because a lot of other people around me were Black and brown people that I felt I could relate to,” she recounts. By accepting volunteers with no experience and connecting her with people in the field, she says, WBF opened the door for her successful career in animal medicine.

New York isn’t the only city where caring for injured wildlife is a pathway to animal medicine for historically excluded people. At Great Lakes Pigeon Rescue in Chicago, the requirements to volunteer are similar to those at WBF, says vice president and shelter director Blanca Uribe: “Be interested in pigeons and be willing to help in any way you can.” 

Urban wildlife rehab offered underrepresented folks like Sanchez, Brathwaite, and myself an accessible opportunity to gain real-world experience in animal care and new insights into the plights of animals and humans alike. When I spoke with Rita McMahon, founder and director of WBF, about this, she pointed to a concept called the “pigeon paradox.” The idea is that the success of conservation depends on the ability of everyday city folk to connect with everyday wildlife, like pigeons. There is no better example of the pigeon paradox in action than WBF. “When a heart-broken rescuer comes to our door begging for help for the distressed creature they found, we do not turn them away,” McMahon says. “They care about the injured animal they brought and we want them to continue their commitment.”

For me, the fruitfulness of working at WBF was twofold. Not only did my time there kindle a love for wildlife, but it ultimately revived my wilted childhood dream: I am proud to say I will begin school this fall at the Virginia-Maryland College of Veterinary Medicine. My goal is to care for animals that are similarly excluded as my people. Pigeons, geese, swans, starlings, sparrows—despite their status as undesirable species, these are the birds who represent our cities most. As Sarah Sirica, clinic director at City Wildlife in Washington, D.C., told me, “It is important to take care of these species because they are who live here.” 

And maybe, after all, the patients feel this too. In August, during my final week as summer staff, Chowder, who had grown from a nestling who could not eat on his own to a spunky, brown-spotted juvenile, was released with dozens of other rehabilitated patients. The pigeons itched for freedom; their feet swished back and forth, and their coos crescendoed as we approached the release site. When we opened the boxes, the birds dashed towards the sky into anonymity. Chowder was in the flock somewhere, but he was too free and too far away to spot.

That is, until he showed up a week later, foraging outside of WBF with the rest of his chosen flock. Of all the places he could’ve called home, he decided to stay here.