From the top floor of the bus I look at a pigeon walking on the roof of the bus stop. She observes the passengers getting on, and I observe her. I wonder what she thinks.
Maybe she’ll get home and tell her family how bad the traffic is. It is so lucky to have wings.
She looks at the people just as distractedly as I tend to look at pigeons. Without noticing much about what she is looking at, except if many gather in the same place, or if there is somebody looking particularly disheveled.
If she thinks we look very scruffy she might decide to feed us. Perhaps she’ll she will also bring her chicks to throw food at us from the top of the bus shelter while they playfully look at how we fight for it.
“Look at how they shake their little phones! They must be happy” says the smallest. She still hasn’t studied the local fauna, and so she doesn’t know that not all humans grow devices at the end of their arms.
The local authorities, in charge of the human habitat, put up posters in Pigeonish language, warning that humans should not be fed pigeon food. In concerned language, they explain that organic seeds lower our cholesterol too much, which puts our social ecosystem at risk by ruining our pharmaceutical corporations.
But the pigeons enjoy feeding us so much that they couldn’t care less. They have wings after all.