Oct 26, 2017

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Nicobar Pigeon
These striking portraits of the pigeons and doves of New Guinea and Australia form part of Leila Jeffreys’ current exhibition,Ornithurae Volume 1, at Olsen Gruin, New York, until 12 November. The captions below are from an accompanying essay, Reconsider the Pigeon, by biologist Tim Low. All photographs: Leila Jeffreys

Bleeding-heart dove
The words ‘pigeon’ and ‘dove’ overlap in meaning, which explains how the domestic pigeon canhave as its forebear a species called the rock dove (Columbia livia), found on rough slopes in Europe, Asia and north Africa

Superb fruit dove
While most street pigeons are as drab as businessmen in suits, the fruit doves of New Guinea and Australia come dressed as if for a mardi gras, in purples, yellows and other fearless colours. The vivid rainforest fruits they eat have given them an appreciation for colours on each other

Emerald dove
Charles Darwin was enthusiastic about pigeons because the profusion of breeds concocted by fanciers lent support to his theory of evolution

Wompoo pigeon
His colleague Alfred Russel Wallace had a different kind of interest, aroused by his years in the Indo-Malayan archipelago. Wallace had noticed that pigeons ‘achieved their maximum development, as regards beauty, variety, and number of species’, in the region around New Guinea

Crested pigeon
Only in New Guinea and Australia do pigeons indulge in head ornaments, recorded in prefixes such as ‘crested’, ‘topknot’ and ‘plumed’

Squatter pigeon
Wallace surmised that New Guinea had served as the cradle from which the world’s pigeons emerged. Today’s thinking is that pigeons emerged somewhere in the southern hemisphere, although there is no certainty about where. The oldest fossils have been found in Australia

Topknot pigeon
They were domesticated in the first place for eating, and their large breast muscles, which recommended them as food, suit long journeys by powering strong flight

Peaceful dove
Scientists testing pigeons’ navigation have found them to be multi-skilled, able to return home by evaluating landscape smells, the position of the sun, planetary magnetism, the lines marked by highways, and probably infrasound

Rose-crowned fruit dove
Psychologists take pigeons seriously for their own reasons, respecting them as birds that excel at visual categorisation. In one test, categorising coloured rectangles on a screen, pigeons left university students far behind

Wonga Pigeon
Pigeons were domesticated thousands of years ago, long before chickens or ducks, which makes them the bird on Earth with which we have the longest close relationship. Pigeons matter