Towards the end of his reminiscences, the 103-year-old narrator of Al Croseri’s new documentary grows wistful as he reflects on the need to cull the homing pigeon flocks that were for decades at the center of his life. You can’t keep the losers, he says, or the winners will suffer.
Croseri’s film, a lengthy and detailed monologue by the last surviving “pigeoneer,” faces a similar problem–but one that can’t be solved. For, simply put, there are no losers among the anecdotes and images compiled by the director of the splendid The Flight. As a result, Pigeoneers, for all the fascinating material it assembles, will strike many viewers as a little on the long side, better perhaps for dipping into than for consuming at a single sitting.
The film begins with a dramatic, and dramatically scored, montage of vintage photos and film clips depicting the activities of the Army Pigeon Corps. “Culling” some of these elements might have made the entry of Colonel Clifford A. Poutre more effective, but they do provide a visual context for the stories that fill the rest of Poutre’s monologue.
Not all of those stories are specifically about his work with pigeons. We learn, for example, that the later colonel slept on the floor as a toddler because he knew even then that he wanted to be a soldier, and that his career as an army bugler was cut short when he found himself moved one evening to offer an unwanted encore. For the most part tightly narrated, sometimes charming, some of these anecdotes can also wander, and much or all, for instance, of the rather pointless story of the weedy ballfield could easily have been cut.
Poutre’s entry into military pigeoneering turns out to have been a whimsical, even an arbitrary choice. The affection with which he relates his subsequent experiences, from New Jersey to Hawaii, is constantly obvious, though, and birders and other viewers without, perhaps, a consuming interest in domestic pigeons as such will nonetheless learn something here and there. Pigeons released at sea, for example, will fly up to 100 miles back to their Pacific island homes, even at night, but reveal a notable reluctance to cross mountains. Pigeons returning to their lofts through the dark skies of the Hawaiian islands could attain speeds of up to 60 miles an hour, while the bright lights of metropolitan New York slowed their progress considerably–an observation of manifest relevance to the behavior of wild migratory birds.
Among the carefully chosen images are some very disturbing ones showing the relationship between pigeons, their handlers, and native raptors. I leave it to the reader to guess which of those parties is represented in the vintage photos by proudly displayed corpses.
His long career as an Army pigeoneer brought Colonel Poutre into contact with a number of well-known figures in the 1940s and 1950s. For example, he knew Ding Darling–but unfortunately, the account of that acquaintance trails off into the anecdote of a bizarre publicity stunt, with no further mention of the great conservationist.
Most fascinating of all is Poutre’s friendship with Nikola Tesla, an impassioned pigeon handler in the last years of his life. For reasons inscrutable, though, rather than simply allowing Poutre to tell the story of this strange relationship, the director introduces this segment of his film with nearly fifteen minutes (!) of Fiorello Laguardia’s radio tribute to the great inventor; by the time the colonel’s own reminiscences commence, the viewer may wonder whether she has somehow stepped into a different film. A careful cull here would have worked wonders for the film’s coherence.
In general, one gets the impression, perhaps unfairly, that Croseri found himself, understandably enough, incapable of reducing the mass of fine material he had assembled for his film. But the viewer who sticks with the documentary will all the same be richly rewarded–and will inevitably come to share the director’s obvious affection for his centenarian narrator, whose death not long after the completion of filming marked the end of a fascinating phase in the relationship between birds and those who love them.
