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Birds of Kentucky: Church going pigeons 2011-02-28 - 201 Greensburg ST, Columbia, KY - Photo by Ed Waggener. A good place to spot pigeons in Downtown Columbia, KY, is at one of their favorite roosts, atop the distinctive coping on the Columbia Baptist Church yellow brick walls. On a gray day, in accidental B/W setting, the birds seem almost a part of the masonry. In the 1950's the birds were much more plentiful, with hundreds filling the skies at one time as they flew from the Historic Adair County Courthouse to the Blue Barn area adjoining the Columbia Cemetery, to the majestic Mary Lucy Lowe and Lenora Cundiff barn, where pigeons in the hundreds, maybe thousands, hung out. That barn, back then, stood along a treelined, creek gravel and - on the hill above the Young ST and Miller Avenue and Lowe's Lane intersection - a deeply rutted clay mud passage, so infrequently traveled it was the venue for many sweetheart interludes - not so popular as the Columbia Cemetery, the Rock Quarry, or Conover Woods as a parking place; but it was a handy, gas-saving, and safely secluded for almost any romantic activity, or so we've been told. As for the birds, quasi-military action was taken against them in the 1950s, led by crusading Adair County News editor Louis DeRossett, who gathered with leading sportsmen on the Square, in front of the Adair Hotel, on afternoons to shoot the birds out of the sky. It was not so gruesome as the Pine Bluff, AR turkey drop, but, next to the Cold War threats, the scenes were sufficiently traumatic to leave lasting psychological scars, almost the equal of a kid's fear of the principal's electric paddle or a few of the faculty bullies in the schools of the day. -CM. Permalink | Comments?

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