Hi!

It’s Barb. Maybe you saw me in the Life Finds A Way logo (or remember when I stole a French fry on your family vacation) and thought “oh, that’s just another dirty pigeon.” But you’d be wrong.

Pigeons have long been misunderstood. That’s what makes me the perfect mascot for Life Finds A Way.

I’m named after Barbara McClintock, the scientist and cytogeneticist awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1983, and the only woman who has received an unshared Nobel Prize in that category.

Dr. McClintock figured out that DNA isn’t as fixed as everyone thought, showing that life finds a way to adapt and change, even at the genetic level. Her work was dismissed for decades, and as a pigeon, I can relate to how it feels to be set aside by humans.

My ancestors were among the earliest domesticated animals, going back thousands of years. We were initially farmed for food, but our keen and unexplainable internal GPS made us ideal messengers. In fact, I come from a long line of valiant squabs, like Cher Ami, a homing pigeon that saved the Lost Battalion in World War I, or G.I. Joe, a pigeon that received the Dickin Medal after saving the lives of Allied soldiers in World War II.

But as technology progressed, we became obsolete to humans, were abandoned to become “feral pigeons”, and rebranded as pests. Our contributions to humanity and our value were forgotten. No one ever made a song called “Telephone Killed The Homing Pigeon Star.”