Whether you get a pigeon who has been socialized or a pigeon who has never had any significant interactions with people, a bird in a new environment may not adjust to its new situation easily. Some pigeons may not have any issue at all acclimatizing to a new place and to your presence, but others may have significant trouble making that jump. This is a small guide to help you try to ease that transition.

This guide breaks down what most pigeons need at a basic level to better adjust to an unfamiliar situation and then offers some strategies to help you follow these invisible pigeon guidelines. There will always be special cases that may never really tame down, but the increase in a basic comfort level will still be noticeable.

Habituation, Predictability, and Remembering Your Audience

There are what could be considered three main aspects to helping a pigeon get used to you and their new home: habituation, predictability, and remembering what animal you are dealing with. Let’s quickly go over each one.

Habituation is the process of becoming habituated, or adjusted over time, to something that was originally not a comfortable experience but has been experienced enough times without significant negativity that the experience is no longer as bothersome.

Think of a person on their first day of work or school—it can be quite a stressful experience. But over time, as they learn the geography of the building, the general patterns and routines they perform throughout the day, and get to know the people around them, the initial stress of the unknown passes. However, to achieve this adjustment, they must repeatedly experience the environment and routines on a regular basis. It is hard to habituate to anything that isn’t a regular part of one’s life. So habituation requires repeated effort and time for the experience to soak in.

Predictability simply means that you have routines and cues that can be easily learned and predicted. Your pigeon should always understand what to expect from you to be comfortable around you.

Remembering your audience is perhaps the most difficult for some people to keep in mind. Consider the animal you are trying to ease! Pigeons are prey animals, which is very important because it directly influences their innate confidence level. A cat or a dog will have more inherent confidence than any prey animal when adjusting to a new home. They may not be at the very top of their ancestors’ food chains, but they were much, much further up than our pigeons.

Pigeons are hard-wired to be on the lookout for predators at all times. Unfortunately for us, our hands—and fingers in particular—look an awful lot like the talons of a bird of prey. Hands are inherently pretty scary to a pigeon! But, overall, unsocialized pigeons just have to learn that we are not going to eat them, and it’s up to us to convince them.

In summary, with pigeons being prey animals, they learn things are safe best by being repeatedly exposed to non-traumatic events without pushing their limits. Seeing things many times with nothing wrong happening—and perhaps even with something positive happening—reinforces the idea that these things are safe. And lastly, being able to predict what you are going to do is key: the worst thing for a prey animal to try and adjust to is a person they cannot predict anything from. How can they know what you’ll do if they can’t predict you at all? You could do anything! They’re prey animals, so they are likely to assume the worst if they’re already afraid. You have to learn to work with these factors.

Tips, Tricks, and Strategies

There are many small tidbits to help your pigeon adjust—and more complicated ones, too.