Adopter Erica & rescued King pigeon Basil (squab survivor)

Since you’re reading this, you probably know a little about Palomacy. Or maybe you know a lot. Or think you know a lot? To me, Palomacy is a big, gorgeous, many faceted gem which can be hard to conceptualize all at once with so many planes and angles. So I’m here to try and give you a tour of our shared jewel.

The deadly gap in animal welfare that allowed for domestic, unreleasable pigeons and doves to be bred, used, lost,  hurt and killed (as if they were disposable) is what started all this in 2007. I didn’t mean to start a rescue but a bird needed help and I helped and then the next one needed help and the demand has grown exponentially ever since. These birds are SO help-able (easy, smart, quiet, domestic, hardy, charming) and yet most all the shelters, rescues, sanctuaries turned them away. We started accidentally and then became MickaCoo (within the warm nest of parrot rescue Mickaboo) and then we found our calling, our destiny, and became Palomacy. Palomacy is pigeon diplomacy. We knew these birds needed more than a rescue, they needed a movement.

Palomacy’s First Responders

More than 100 people reach out to Palomacy every day seeking help for a found bird or one who needs rescuing or with questions and concerns or stories about their own birds. It is inspiring and exhausting both. There is a huge demand for pigeon and dove rescue and adoption help (millions of domestics need rescue every year in the US alone) and so anyone who helps pigeons and doves is always overwhelmed with infinite pleas for help compounded by the dearth of resources. It IS getting better, though. There are SO many more shelters, sanctuaries and rescues helping pigeons and doves today than there were 16 years ago!

Palomacy Help Group

I call this facet: Palomacy Worldwide (distinct from our hands-on services provided only in the San Francisco Bay Area, Palomacy Local). The majority of inquiries come first to the Palomacy Help Group on Facebook, from everywhere, near and far. This is the fastest and best place to get help for a pigeon or dove. (Many people tell us they have joined or rejoined or stayed on Facebook because of our group.) It is an amazing, positive, thriving, and rapidly growing mutual aid community where everybirdy, as we call ourselves, from total newbies to bird nerds, through avian professionals and Palomacy experts convene to help each other help birds. We are averaging 5,000 posts and comments monthly & over 80,000 views (just on Facebook). And going up every month! Our Help Group, led and moderated by a team of 15 of Palomacy’s most knowledgeable volunteers (located all across the country), is focused and consistent with a strong culture of compassion for all and a commitment to Palomacy’s principles. We have lots of fun (and tears too) in our group but never at the expense of the birds; the birds’ needs are the priority. Becoming a Palomacy Help Group Mod requires exceptional communication and diplomatic skills and the exposure to every possible question, situation, resource, challenge, etc. serves as Palomacy’s University. Our Mods are amongst Palomacy’s hardest working and most impactful volunteers. They are a 24/7/365 lifeline for pigeons and doves and the people trying to help them. And, faced daily with so many at-risk birds, most of our Mods have themselves become major rescuers, supported only by Palomacy’s encouragement and experience, no funding. Only those caring for birds in the San Francisco Bay Area receive direct support from Palomacy’s foster homes, avian vet care and adoption services. This is something that needs to change. We need to raise enough funding to provide at least some support to these rescuers! All of the help we give- the going out late night to pick up an injured bird the caller is afraid to touch; the drop everything and drive however far to a good avian vet (and for some, pay out of pocket); the dining table medical fostering; the hours spent coaching and and and… all of it we do for free! (We fundraise for donations but no fees except $10/bird to adopters- the same fee we started with 16 years ago. It averages almost $1,000 per bird we take in to subsidize all that we are doing for everybirdy.

Palomacy Phone Line (415) 851-5948

Palomacy receives about 150 phone calls/voice mails per month and three of our expert Help Group Mod volunteers, Dion, Robin and Adrienne, respond every day to the callers from all across the country seeking help, info and referrals. They work hard to coach and connect and have close relations with many resources near and far. And our phone responders are daily arranging emergency rescues with other volunteers- or going themselves!

Palomacy Website: PigeonRescue.org

Our website is an always welcoming door to and stable home for hundreds of articles about pigeon and dove care; stories abour their rescues, triumphs and tragedies; for our foster birds’ and adopted birds’ bios; our applications and donation links, events and news and announcements and merch (shirts, stickers, mugs, calendars, strollers and more); for showing off our Top Rated GreatNonProfit badge (246 five star endorsements) and Top Ranked GlobalGiving medallion; for our videos and press links and free downloads and resource pages and social media feeds and newsletter archive and so, so many photos. Our website averages 1,600 pageviews a day for a total, so far, of 4,401,897 pigeon and dove-positive page views! We seek out guest blog posts and have amazing stories from all over. No monetization, no ads. It is a sturdy WordPress site designed and built nine years ago by one of our many super generous & talented volunteers, Shae. She set it up clean and clear so that I can update it and maintain it and add to it and modify it without tears. We get so many compliments about our site and lots of gratitude for the valuable content. Sometimes adopters-to-be find our site, build their aviary to meet our pigeon-friendly, predator and rodent-proof guidelines and then contact us and we are gifted with the joy of a turnkey aviary, safe and ready for birds to move in! This is a piece of Palomacy that is high impact for low cost with a ton more potential. It would be awesome if we had a webmaster to glow us up!

Palomacy People

Palomacy has two paid staff, myself as executive director and Jill Shepard as care director and together we lead and deploy our team of more than 100 amazing volunteers through out the Greater San Francisco Bay Area, from Half Moon Bay and Salinas in the south all the way through Sacramento and Roseville in the north. We respond to emergencies- late at night, in the rain, on holidays. We empower good Samaritans to become fosters and adopters; teach and coach and support and console* fosters and adopters and volunteers and shelter and sanctuary and rescue staff and vets. We provide medical foster care, supportive care and sometimes fospice care. (*Rescue work is traumatic.) We help coordinate outreach and humane education events large and small. We post post post on social media to help raise awareness, inspire compassion and plead for support- for foster homes and adopters and donations. (Our expenses in 2023 will be about $250K. Eighty-five percent of our funding comes from individual donors at an average of $60 per donation. We have to inspire nearly 4,000 acts of giving to cover our bare minimum expenses! People always ask, Where is your shelter located? We don’t have one. We wish we did! We all work and foster from our homes and backyard aviaries and, when we get really lucky, with a public-facing partner like the Ploughshares Nursery in Alameda. We use our own phones and computers, pay for our own Internet and gas and bridge tolls ($7+ per bridge to get anywhere and two toll trips are common!), bird food, supplies, etc. Palomacy pays all of our fostered birds’ vet care expenses (which range from $200 minimum to $1,800 to $4,000+ for anything requiring surgery) and we do our best to loan or build or secure cages and aviaries for our fosters but often, they pay. They buy pigeon pants and nest boxes and carriers or strollers for outings; they sometimes pay for bird-sitting or make a donation to Palomacy if a volunteer helps out if they’re away. Palomacy is doing and investing SO MUCH more than shows up in spreadsheets.

Palomacy volunteers are extraordinarily versatile and flexible and generous. Most everyone who volunteers with us serves in multiple capacities including fostering and transportation and outreach events and helping to aviary-build and emergency rescues and social media posts and writing guest blog posts and special projects and so much more. And donating on top of all that! (They even buy their own T shirts.) Palomacy people are the nicest people you’ll meet. The sublime charms of the columbiformes we care for temper us. They make us better than we were.

Special Roles

We have volunteers working hard in lots of special jobs too. We have a six member board chaired since 2014 by the multi-talented Clare (securer of our independent nonprofit public charity status) who took over after Cheryl, who having rescued a King pigeon named Dovee in 2009, built a big aviary, fostered and adopted and rescued and has tabled at countless outreach events, and helped with all of our annual and holiday events. Our exiting board treasurer Ellie has invested many hours in wrangling our accounts and guiding our operations. Faye first volunteered with Palomacy via our lobby pigeons at Humane Society of Silicon Valley and now handles our people database and annual appeal snail mailing list, as well as volunteers for rescue and aviary-building projects. Liese, also first engaged in Palomacy with our lobby pigeons, is our dove expert and guide among other things. Jiu produces our annual wall calendar and Heather produces every page of our 365 bird-a-day desk calendar and covers the cost of production and this year has been our one-person fulfillment center for both as well! Our bird database, Animal Shelter Manager (ASM), is now under the diligent care of Adrienne (who also answers the phone line and produces social media) and she took over after her predecessor Shae meticulously updated and polished hundreds of birds’ entries for three years. Jenna was recruited by very clever little self-rescuing doves named Killer and Friend and since then, she has built them an aviary, has built an aviary for pigeons and adopted 14, is our YouTube channelmaster and will soon take on the role of board treasurer. Patti was brought on board in 2014 by a big, beautiful self-rescuing pigeon named Sochi for whom she built a big, deluxe aviary and adopted a lot of friends also does a ton of outreach and delivers really compelling humane education at schools every year, rolling in with two, three and last I heard, four double-decker strollers filled with pigeon ambassadors!

Dion is, in addition to a phone line responder, our go-to for all the injured or too-early-fledged ferals we help along their way to wildlife rehab in the Bay Area. Christiana is our party mistress, maker of all the extraordinary magic from Flocktoberfest in 2017 through COO-CHELLA, Mascoorade, Pijama Party and Summer of Dove 2022. Our Ploughshares Foster Team volunteers each provide one day a week of luxury hotel level aviary cleaning and bird care of 28 rescued birds with never, not one, oops baby since they began in 2015. Can you even calculate how many real eggs successfully swapped for feggs that is? A modest guesstimate says 10 eggs per year times 12 female egg layers times eight years is about 1,000 oops babies not hatched! (Definitely the record holders within Palomacy!) Josette and Luis design, source and build aviaries, haul heavy stuff, and donate their beverage service at our annual events. Plus all of these people and the 85+ others I haven’t mentioned do lots and lots of stuff too! It really is extraordinary.

Palomacy Foster Volunteers

At any given time, there are approximately 40 sites around the Greater Bay Area fostering Palomacy’s 200ish adoptable pigeons and doves. These birds have found themselves, through no fault of their own, without anyone else to care for them and so they are at fatal risk. Our foster volunteers learn on the job, on the phone and text, in the Help Group, from each other and at outreach events but most of all, the birds teach them who they are and what they need. We have a lot of long term foster volunteers, people who have been with us for 10 or 12 years, caring for a couple of indoor birds or a backyard aviary or both. Our birds never time out and they live with proper long term care and conditions for as long as it takes to get adopted. We have one big handsome King pigeon named Zee who has ben fostered since 2014! And a beautiful racing survivor named Jade, married to Chloe, since 2015. And some birds go in to foster care and everybirdy soon realizes, Oh, this is home! And they are.

Palomacy’s Adopters

The first thing I was told when I started trying to help get a (doomed) domestic pigeon out of a (very nice) shelter  was they are “unadoptable.” I submit to you that they are in fact exceptionally adoptable given adoption services. I’m just going to leave these photos here to make this point for me.

Palomacy Birds

Every single bird that Palomacy takes in to our care, to heal up, to foster, to adopt, to see through to a dignified and loving death if, despite everything, they don’t make it, are all recorded in the ASM platform. Every bird is named, photographed, their details entered and updated when they transfer to a different foster home or to their forever home and sometimes, when they return to us for additional support.

Our current caseload of foster birds

Palomacy’s Donors

We exist thanks to the kindness and generosity of our amazing donors. There are so many worthy causes and we are filled with gratitude when our humble rescue earns the support of a donor. Money is a funny thing. It doesn’t fit in very well with what we’re doing. Once, a venture capitalist I sat next to at a product testing, asked me how we could monetize our booming pigeon rescue. And that’s the thing: we can’t. Not really. The birds’ success has to be our profit and the funding relegated to just paying bills, nothing more lofty than that, I think. We do want to become self-sufficient, we do want to work from a place of modest abundance rather than scary scarcity. It is by the miracles of our donors who keep us aloft that we are still here with the opportunity to solve the puzzle of providing top notch care to little beings with no pockets. (Donate here.)

Palomacy Veterinary Partners

Disco Dr. Vanessa Hernandez

Over the years, we have worked with most all the avian vets in the region and we’re very lucky to have quite a few. Over time, despite their being 40 miles from most anywhere (and lots further for many of us), we have worked more and more closely with Dr. Brian Speer of Medical Center for Birds (MCFB) and his incredible team of five avian vets. I can’t imagine trying to do this work without them. Birds don’t give much notice when they’re going to be sick nor arrive in a box, mortally injured, hawk-struck or cat-caught. The MCFB team bends over backwards every day to fit our emergencies in, to deliver platinum card life-saving for our birds somehow within our never enough funds. And they do it so kindly! Truly, we are grateful to all vets for the really challenging work they do and we hold MCFB especially close in our hearts for all their support and encouragment.

Palomacy Shelter and Rescue Partners

I started doing this as a “Smalls” volunteer at the San Francisco Animal Care and Control where, as the open door shelter, they accepted stray domestic pigeons rescued off the streets but didn’t consider them adoptable. Together, over all these years, we have debunked that myth and proven that not only are unreleasable pigeons adoptable, they make exceptional companions for so many people who appreciate their droll wit, deep feels and lazy ways. We are thrilled that so many shelters and rescues and sanctuaries are becoming more and more equitable in their care for domestic pigeons and doves. The Oakland Animal Shelter and Peninsula Humane Society-SPCA have incorporated pigeon aviaries and outreach into their work and their adoption numbers are increasing. There are amazing wildlife rescues partnering with pigeon rescuers so that together, all pigeons and doves, feral and domestic, have a chance at help. Here in the San Francisco Bay Area, WildCare successfully treats and rehabs hundreds of feral pigeons annually (averaging more than 600ish every year).

Palomacy’s Social Media Friends

You are helping to lift up pigeons and doves so powerfully! Your appreciation of their beauty, their wisdom and loyalty and resilience and just their being is having a PROFOUNDLY positive effect on their reputation. You are moving the needle from nuisance back to noble. I’ve been here doing this 16 years, long enough to see the progress we are making together. AND WE ARE MAKING PROGRESS.

More Facets

There are more facets to shine light on. This Palomacy thing is surprisingly big for how small we are! But for now, tonight, this examination will have to do.

Gratefully,