“Sit down, I have to tell you about a bisexual pigeon and all the drama he has brought to my barn,” declared US farmer Chase Barnes in a recent viral TikTok video. It turns out, Barnes’s prize pigeon, which won a 2024 national “Best in Breed” award, wasn’t having trouble hatching eggs with his partner because of fertility problems. It was because they were both male. When Barnes paired the bird with a female, the male partner refused to be separated, and they became a happy trio, raising chicks as a bisexual pigeon throuple. The Internet was all-a-flutter with the video, which has racked up over 1.2 million views and been shared across social media. But pigeon bisexuality is nothing new. We’ve actually known about it for a really, really long time.
The common pigeon, formally known as the rock dove (Columba livia), is one of the most well-established queer animals in all of nature. More than 2,300 years ago, in his pioneering zoological work History of Animals (c. mid-4th century BCE), Aristotle observed the tendency of pigeon hens to court, mate, and pair bond with other females when no males are around. By the modern era, pigeon bisexuality was already old — indeed, ancient — news. A field report in an ornithology journal from 1941 detailed observations of several same-sex feral pigeon matings, noting that “it is known that captive domestic pigeons sometimes mate homosexually.”
It’s not just common pigeons either. Several species of pigeons have documented bisexual behavior among both males and females, including courtship, mounting, nesting, and pair-bonding. But our feathered TikTok star aside, same-sex behavior is more common among female pigeons than males.
A 2018 study published in Scientific Reports conducted a couple of experiments on pigeons. They removed large numbers of males from one colony of feral pigeons to create a female-heavy sex ratio, and then did the opposite in a second colony to create a male-heavy sex ratio. They found that altering the sex ratios led to same-sex behavior among both males and females, though not to the same degree. The males who mated with one another were fewer in number and their pair bonds lasted only several weeks, whereas a greater number of females mated with one another and created more stable and long-lasting bonds that “could successfully raise offspring in a manner comparable to female-male pairs.”
The researchers concluded that same-sex behavior is an adaptive trait among females, who showed better outcomes when in same-sex pairs than going it alone. For the males, their natural aggression toward one another made relationships too difficult to maintain for long periods, but some did still shack up for a time.
It’s wild to imagine, sitting on a city park bench and watching the pigeons, that one of the most famous thinkers of all time once did the same thing back in the Iron Age, and recorded his observations in one of the earliest works of natural history — what would later come to be known as science. Thousands of years before TikTok, people were noticing bi pigeons. At least they didn’t have windshields to clean.