From Big Betty to Castor

August 21, 2026

Before The Cast (and long before Gen122): I Used to Want the Pigeons Gone

It may be hard to believe now, but I used to want the pigeons gone.

Long before our large, floofy flock we affectionately call The Cast, long before the aviary, and certainly long before Gen122, there was a new home we moved into that I loved.

It was just what I had been looking for—especially because it had a basement, something I had hoped to find and which is rare in this area.

Apparently, the pigeons liked the house too.

The neighborhood has rooftop air-conditioning units, which I later learned offered them safe places to nest. I remember seeing pigeon spikes near the pool when we first moved in, but I removed them for unrelated reasons.

A few months later, the weather warmed up and we started using the pool.

That is when I became horrified by the pigeon poop on the pool deck.

I could also hear pigeons on the roof, and I began thinking about how we were all surely going to get sick. I remember telling my husband exactly that: we were all going to get sick, and we needed to find a way to get the pigeons to leave.

At one point, I was so convinced everything up there was contaminated that I insisted my husband go onto the roof and vacuum the poop—and then made him leave the shop vac up there because, in my mind, it too was now contaminated.

He thought I was being ridiculous.

He was probably right.

But one thing was certain: I felt the pigeons needed to go.

Not by harming them. Never that. I just wanted to convince them that somewhere—anywhere—else would be preferable.

I asked our pest-control man, otherwise known as the bug man, if he knew of any way to deter them. But when I discovered that many of the methods people used involved harm, I kept looking for another option.

Naturally, my mind went to an unnecessarily elaborate solution.

I began imagining a mechanical jungle cat.

Not a real one. A completely harmless pigeon-deterrent contraption covered in leopard-print fabric, with movement and eyes that could move—something convincing enough that a pigeon looking down from the roof might reconsider its real-estate decisions.

And that wonderful basement I had been so excited about? At the time, it was my creative workspace, full of fabric, supplies, and all the things I liked to experiment with.

So I was quite serious about the jungle cat.

I was making patterns, cutting fabric, thinking through the mechanics, and already had the perfect spot picked out for my big cat.

But before my great mechanical-jungle-cat invention ever came to life, something much simpler accomplished the job.

I started noticing there wasn’t any new poop.

I had been vacuuming the pool-deck area regularly, and suddenly it was staying clean.

We had also been using the pool a lot, leaving toys and floats in the water. And then I realized what had changed.

The whale float.

We called her Big Betty.

Big Betty had enormous eyes, and because she floated around the pool all day, moving back and forth with the water, apparently she was convincing enough.

The pigeons left.

Problem solved.

I was very happy to put the jungle-cat project to rest. It would have been a lot of work.

And I was rather proud of myself.

The irony of that is not lost on me now.

Because about a year and a half later, one pigeon would walk into my garage.

And that pigeon would eventually change the direction of my life—my butterfly effect.

That pigeon was Castor, the lead of The Cast.

If anyone had told me then what was ahead, I would have said it was impossible—and that they clearly did not know me at all.

At the time, there was no flock.

There was no rescue.

There were no pigeons hidden in a basement.

There was no land bought because birds needed somewhere better to live.

There was no enormous aviary built by our family.

There was no illustrated archive.

There was only a woman who wanted pigeons off her roof.

And Big Betty.

I had absolutely no idea what was coming.

It is still hard to believe when I look back at everything that has happened. Fortunately, I had been taking photographs, as I usually do, all along the way.

They remind me that yes—this really is how it all happened.

A little more context

Looking back, there is another part of this beginning that matters.

My fear of germs at the time did not exist entirely in a vacuum.

The couple of years before we bought that house had been difficult for our family. The year before we moved, our newborn daughter had to be delivered at 28 weeks because of fetal hydrops. She was my second baby with this rare fetal condition—something already unusual, and especially difficult because we never received a clear explanation for why it had happened twice.

That unexpected delivery was followed by another NICU stay, this time about two months long. There were other medical challenges during those years as well, and somewhere in the middle of all of it, I had become extremely protective—especially when it came to germs and anything I thought might threaten my family.

By the end of 2019, though, things were finally settling down.

Everyone was healthy. Some long-running worries seemed to be behind us.

And I was ready to get out of the house.

I actually remember praying about it.

I had felt isolated and, in many ways, essentially locked down since 2017. Going into 2020, I was determined to change that.

We were going to get out more.

Do normal things.

Be social again.

Can you believe that was my New Year’s resolution going into 2020?

Needless to say, getting out did not happen.

After all that time spent working myself up to rejoin the world, the world locked down with me.

Looking back now, I can see that I had become pretty discouraged over those years. I had finally reached a point where I felt free enough to start over, and suddenly everyone was being told to stay home, avoid people, and worry about germs.

It was a very strange time in my life.

And somewhere in that strange time, a pigeon started coming into my garage.

I was working on an old dresser and decoupaging Psalm 91 onto it—which, looking back, feels like a rather fitting backdrop to a story about fear, refuge…and eventually, feathers.

This bird did not look quite like the pigeons I was accustomed to seeing.

He was mostly white, with darker markings, and he would simply appear in the garage—very casual, very cool, wandering around and looking at things.

Our garage, in every house we have ever lived in, has always been a sight and a total mess. A pigeon probably could have been living in there and we would not have known it.

And, as it turns out, I have a couple of garage stories for later.

This pigeon was Castor.

Of course, I didn't know him as Castor yet.

But I also wasn't thinking about humane pigeon deterrents anymore.

I wasn't thinking about jungle cats.

I wasn't thinking about inflatable whales with giant eyes.

Something was different.

Maybe it was him.

Maybe it was me.

Looking back now, I think I may have been emotionally vulnerable enough to be touched by this little bird who kept showing up.

My faith has always been central to the way I understand my life, and at that point I was looking for encouragement—for some sense that things were going to be okay.

I cannot tell you that I knew why this pigeon kept visiting me.

I didn't.

So I did what I tend to do when something gets my attention.

I started researching it.

Why would a pigeon keep coming into my garage?

I don't remember exactly which search led to which answer anymore. What I do remember is that very quickly, I stopped finding only answers about my pigeon.

I started finding out about pigeons.

And then I kept going.

I learned things I had never heard before—things about their intelligence, their navigation, their relationships with people, and the roles they had played throughout human history.

The more I found, the more I wanted to know.

I started digging through whatever corners of the internet I could find, following one piece of information into another.

And somewhere along the way, another question began bothering me:

Why isn't any of this talked about?

These birds were everywhere.

I had lived around them.

Complained about them.

Humanely deterred them from my house.

And I had known almost nothing about them.

I wasn't thinking about creating Gen122.

Nothing remotely like that had entered my mind.

I wasn't planning an illustrated archive.