IF there’s a language of the sky, Donny Brooks can speak it. Sometimes it’s a little whistle, sometimes a whisper; other times, if the birds are getting a bit fractious, he’ll reach out and say, gently, “come on, come on” and they’ll calm down and fold their wings back in. Donny says that when he comes into the loft on his own, the birds barely move, because they know him. He’s learned how to talk to them. He’s part of the flock now.

Understanding the relationship within the loft, the politics of it, is also something Donny has learned over the years. Over there in the corner, he says, is the alpha male, and that pigeon on the perch by the window is the stray who’s wondered in from somewhere else. There are also some new birds, imported from Belgium that were sent over as chicks and have settled in well. Their claws clatter on the wood and they settle down again. There’s about 60 of them in all.

The obvious question to ask Donny and his wife Linda, who’s also a pigeon enthusiast, is: why do they love these birds so much? And there’s a second obvious question: why do so many people hate pigeons with just as much passion? Another striking trend has been seen in recent years: a hobby, pigeon keeping, that was once one of the most popular in the country has declined precipitously. There were once a quarter of a million pigeon fanciers in Britain; now there are some 40,000 if you’re lucky. Still a large number, but not a patch on what it was.

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Donny and Linda Brooks have seen the change for themselves at their home in Wishaw. They point out of the loft across the line of houses on their street. There used to be a pigeon loft in virtually every garden, says Linda, but now there’s just theirs. Donny says it was the same in Cumbusnethan, the nearby mining village where he grew up. “A lot of the miners had pigeons,” he says. “It was a working man’s sport but now there is an anti-pigeon mood. The phrase ‘flying rats’ stuck.”

So maybe it’s time to ditch that terrible phrase, flying rats, and replace it with something else that reflects the true, remarkable nature of pigeons. Linda says any animal can be a nuisance if they’re in the “wrong” place, but she sees the gentle joy of them every day. “I miss them when they’re not at the back door,” she says, “because they’re communicators. They talk to each other. You can hear them having their wee conversations.”

The Herald: Linda BrooksLinda Brooks Another pigeon fancier who feels the same way is the writer Jon Day. Jon has just written a book about pigeons, Homing, which follows his efforts to establish a loft and breed racers, but he also explores the extraordinary and often mysterious qualities of the birds. They are miniature jump jets, he says, capable of accelerating from 0-60 miles per hour in under two seconds, but they are also just as intelligent as great apes, dolphins and elephants. But what’s really fascinating is how they find their way home.

“It’s an enduring and controversial biological mystery,” says Jon when I call him at his home in east London. “Most of the consensus seems to be that it’s essentially a suite of different and fairly mysterious navigational senses that we may or may not possess.

“There’s certainly a lot of evidence that pigeons can detect the earth’s magnetic field, but they need to be able to smell in order to find their way home from an unfamiliar place and what’s so amazing and beautiful about that is not that they’re smelling their way home – as we might with the smell of bacon through the house – it’s that the winds, when they blow from different directions, bring with them the sense of a base note and the pigeons can use the changing intensities of those base odours to work out where they have been taken in relation to their loft. Lots of the racers I meet have a sense of wonder and amazement at that fact – that this tiny, 30g creature can perform such impossible and mysterious actions.”

However, like Donny and Linda Brooks, Jon Day feels that a prejudice has built up against pigeons in recent years. Partly, he says, it’s because we have become much more house proud and people are less willing to tolerate their neighbours having pigeon lofts in their gardens. Keeping pigeons also requires a big commitment – it isn't expensive but you do have to be at home quite a lot of the time to let them in and out of the loft. So, in many ways, keeping pigeons just isn’t compatible with modern life.

Jon thinks there’s something else going on as well – something more profound: some people love pigeons, and some people hate them because they’re a bit like us. “Pigeons seem to mimic human behaviour,” he says, “so the place where they grow up generally becomes their home for the rest of their lives and they have this very human, it seems to me, relationship with a place. But they’re also these kind of opportunistic, parasitic creatures that live in our spaces and environment and that’s one of the reasons they’re reviled. They remind us slightly of ourselves.”

Jon also thinks that what humans can see in pigeons helps explain why the popularity of racing pigeons has declined. In the early part of the 20th century, the birds were a vital form of communication and carrying messages from the battlefields made them heroes during the First and Second World War. However, Jon believes that, for the working class men that made up most of the pigeon racing community, their birds used to offer a kind of imaginative travelling that they couldn’t do in reality. Then air fares became more affordable and the pigeon fanciers could travel for themselves. They didn’t need their birds to do it for them and so slowly the lofts were shut up.

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Jon, and Donny and Linda Brooks, have all felt this sense of vicarious freedom in caring for their birds. Jon speaks about the joy of sitting in his garden in east London with a cup of tea and watching his birds flying overhead; all the way through his book he also takes an imaginative flight with the birds, following their mysterious instincts as they race from Thurso in the far north to Leyton in the far south: 12 hours, 504 miles, their wings beating three times a second, their homing beacon taking them home.

This freedom the birds have is important to every fancier, especially because there are some people who think keeping pigeons is cruel. In his book, Jon describes the methods some fanciers will use to win races – culling birds that haven’t performed well during the season, for instance. Donny Brooks also admits that there are some ruthless keepers out there. Not only that, the birds are at risk from predators in the air and on the ground and Linda Brooks tells me that, in any one year, they will lose a third to a half of their flock this way.

When I ask him about it, Jon Day says that, in the end, he wasn’t prepared to use any of the tougher methods on his birds, but both he and Linda and Donny Brooks vehemently deny that pigeon keeping is cruel. “When you open the loft,” says Donny, “it’s up to the bird whether it wants to go out or not and when it goes out, if it wants to stay out, that’s it. You’re rearing a creature that wants to stay with you; you’re its home and its keeper. In order to make a pigeon want to come home, you have to create a home that it wants to come back to.”

Jon agrees with this. “I thought a lot about the ethics of the sport as I am a meat eater and a fisherman,” he says. “But pigeons are free to do what they like when they’re liberated so although I can see that people have objected to the sport, what’s really being celebrated is a relationship that would otherwise die out and I don’t think it’s cruel. It has risks, as does horse racing and dog racing, and I suppose people who object to animal/human interactions as being inherently exploitative might well have things to say about that. But every time you open the loft, the pigeons are free to leave and go away.”

The Herald: Jon also believes that the men and women who love pigeon racing – mostly men, it has to be said – are reminding us not to take the species for granted. We might grumble about them now and complain about their mess and put up spikes to deter them or string that gets tangled round their feet, but shouldn’t we stop this stupid and cruel behaviour? Pigeons might not always be here.

“I’m conscious of the fact that these things look as though they are constants but that might not be true and we should step back,” says Jon. “Passenger pigeons were this hugely populous species of pigeon, mainly in north America. Up until the 19th century, there were flocks of up to a million but within a couple of decades they were wiped out by hunting. And they had a similar reputation in the public imagination as the feral pigeon.”

What Jon hopes is that, in time, we can rehabilitate the reputation of all pigeons and see them as their admirers do. As a survivor, like humans. As an almost perfect example of natural design. As a remarkable little jump jet that can hit 60 miles per hour in two seconds.

“I’m quite struck by the ferocity of anti-pigeon sentiment, among not just urban dwellers,” says Jon, “but often among people who love birds who see them as a devastating mono-culture who come and dominate.” Jon believes, though, that there are ways we can learn to live together better and cites experiments in some European cities where large lofts have been built to encourage the pigeons to nest where they will not be a nuisance.

“One of the reasons feral pigeons have been so successful in an urban context,” he says, “is the fact they see our homes as their homes. So if we’re going to build cities, we need to acknowledge that other creatures will live alongside us.”

Jon also points out that, while pigeon racing may be in decline in Britain, in other parts of the world it’s thriving: Morocco for instance and China, where earlier this year a buyer paid £1million for a prized pigeon. As for the chances of a revival here, Jon is not so sure.

“People don’t have the time or inclination to care for birds in their gardens,” he says. “You have to be there and fly them twice a day, you have to train them and keep an eye on their health. And it’s not the most exciting spectator sport it has to be said – you’re not there at the start; you just wait and eventually the pigeons turn up or not.”

However, one of the greatest joys of keeping pigeons for Jon is taking the imaginative journey, and he urges the rest of us to do the same. Play a game, he says, the next time you see a group of pigeons. Imagine where they may have been or where they may be going. Also, take a look at their legs to see if you can spot a ring that singles them out as racers. Perhaps the bird is taking a rest before the homing instinct kicks in again. Perhaps he’s decided to join a different flock and will never head home – it sometimes happens. But as you look at the pigeons, remember that an animal isn’t worthy of our attention and admiration just because it’s rare. There is beauty and wonder in the familiar too.

Homing: On Pigeons, Dwellings and Why We Return by Jon Day is published by John Murray at £16.99.