I’m the Curriculum Director and STEM teacher at Nomad, a project-based middle school in San Francisco, and we’re on our third year of fostering pigeons with support from Palomacy and it continues to be a real highlight of our year and an enriching experience for our students. We chose the pigeon as our mascot long before any of us had ever held a pigeon after students made the case that pigeons are smart, loyal, and (the real kicker), misunderstood – just like middle schoolers. We’ve loved pigeons from afar but when we found out about Palomacy we were so excited to get to meet our feathered friends in person. After having an educational visit from the Palomacy Team, students proposed converting our outdoor greenhouse into a coop to foster pigeons and for the last three years we’ve fostered pigeons for the spring semester.

Wilbur & Orville in their Nomad aviary

As an animal lover, I’ve truly enjoyed getting to know more about these amazing animals, but as an educator I’ve been thrilled at all the learning opportunities I’ve seen for students. Each year a team of students write up a care proposal detailing how they plan to care for the pigeons and ensure they have their needs met. It’s such a great opportunity for responsibility for the students and they feel real pride in their task. We regularly bring the pigeons into the classroom, usually in the afternoon while students do independent work and practice academic skills. The pigeons immediately improve the mood of the classroom and students are often much more willing to engage with some of their more tedious work if they know they can do it with a pigeon friend. There are also ample opportunities for social emotional learning for students with students practicing communicating their needs and boundaries around spending time with an animal, how to communicate feedback when team members have done a job differently than you would have, etc.

I wouldn’t be able to have any of these wonderful experiences without the help of Palomacy’s wonderful team who have helped train me and each year’s pigeon team to be caretakers of our wonderful birds. We’re so excited to have Wilbur and Orville with us for the rest of this semester and look forward to many more years meeting many more birds.