Every great city has an animal that tells the truth about it, and ours is the pigeon. Not the red-tailed hawk the birders chase through Green-Wood with $3,000 lenses. The pigeon. Gray, unglamorous, unbothered, waiting out the rain under the same scaffolding as you.

Consider what we ask of this bird. We pave every surface, then act scandalized that it lives on pavement. We drop half a pretzel and call the animal that cleans it up a pest. A creature descended from cliff-dwelling doves looked at the Williamsburgh Savings Bank tower and reasonably concluded: cliff. That is not vermin behavior. That is adaptation, which used to be the thing we bragged about in this town.

And pigeons keep our history better than we do. The birds strutting around Grand Army Plaza are the great-great-descendants of wartime messengers and rooftop flocks kept by men in Bushwick who trained them with bamboo poles and whistles. A few of those coops survive. Find one at sunset, watch a hundred birds turn together over the rooftops, and try to stay cynical.

You do not have to feed them. The law, in fact, asks that you don't. Just stop kicking at them on the sidewalk. The pigeon was here before you, will be here after you, and unlike most of us, has never once complained about the rent.