My parents wouldn't let me bring any more sick pigeons home, since the birds always died and were covered in lice. But an egg was easy to hide, and I kept one I'd found on the street in the top drawer of my bedside table, with a gooseneck lamp to incubate it when I was ten years old.

After a couple of weeks, I figured the pigeon was ready to hatch, so I gently began to tap the egg shell open. Inside was a nearly complete baby pigeon, dead, no doubt, since the day I found the egg. I never tried to raise a pigeon again.

Not so easily daunted, there are still guys who keep pigeon coops on their rooftops in New York, often at odds with their neighbors and the City. Each has managed to hold on to his passion and his rooftop pigeon paradise.

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