Darwin takes flight
The Harvard freshmen watched the team of precision gymnasts diving and tumbling through the air, eliciting gasps from the audience as they continued a long tradition of gravity-defying, life-and-death acrobatics. Behold, the noble pigeons. Students taking the “Getting to Know Darwin” freshman seminar visited the home of Jim Spring, a pigeon fancier in Sutton, Mass., to observe his “Birmingham Roller” pigeons in action. Rollers are competitive birds whose talent involves completing a series of continuous tumbles in a midair free fall. Spring has been breeding, flying, and competing through his birds for more than 50 years. “Pigeons have probably been around for millions of years,” Spring said. “Over the years, mutations have resulted in unique differences, and man has cultivated those mutations for his benefit and his pleasure. There are different types of competitions for pigeons — birds bred to race hundreds of miles to their homes, for example — but my competition...