I’ve never seen the episode again since, but it remains etched in my mind. I remember sitting in the theater and being completely riveted-especially by the final scene when the pigeon man flies away with his birds. Arnold, the main character, seeks him out for help when his pet pigeon is injured. The episode was “ The Pigeon Man” and it was about a hermit-like pigeon healer who lives alone on a rooftop.
But, I also love cozy books, and I knew I wanted Coo to feel friendlier and gentler as a story.Īlso, when I was about 8 or 9, I saw an episode of Hey Arnold! that screened unexpectedly before a film in a movie theater where I had gone for a classmate’s birthday party. (It’s a much more intense and wrenching story than Coo.) It stayed with me for years, and planted a seed of wanting to explore some of the same themes and questions. I found it fascinating, and a little disturbing, too. Oh my goodness, lots! When I was a kid, I read Karen Hesse’s The Music of Dolphins, a novel about a girl raised by dolphins and what happens after she is discovered and returned to the human world. Roohoo, the grumpiest pigeon in the flock, speaks quite different from Burr, who is much more even-tempered.ĭid you draw any inspiration from other children’s authors-or even movies- if so, which ones? My goal was to make it clear that their language was simpler than ours, but also have it be flexible enough for the pigeons to express themselves as individuals.
How did you come to create this language?ĭuring the drafting process, I went back and forth for quite some time deciding how to depict the pigeons’ language. The pigeon language is such a fun but important element of the story.
Changing the type of bird produces a radically different book and plot! I did toy with having Coo be raised by another bird species entirely-parrots, or maybe ravens. Most animal species don’t have that level of self-awareness (at least not in the limited ways humans have developed to measure it). And they’ve passed the famous “mirror test” that researchers use as a benchmark for animal intelligence-many pigeons know when they look into a mirror that they are gazing at themselves, not another bird. Besides their ability to precisely navigate back to where they were born from thousands of miles away, with training they can also recognize letters and identify familiar words with typos in them. Coo is a fairy tale, and pigeons in real life of course cannot raise a child, but they are very smart birds. I’m fascinated by their ability to adapt to the hostile urban landscapes humans have created, and by their intelligence.
The question, “Why pigeons?” is maybe a little more complicated. I drew on my longtime fascination with the mythology of feral children, and my affection for the part of Queens that inspired the setting in the book. I saw a flock of pigeons take off from an abandoned factory roof, and suddenly had the thought: what if someone lived up there with them? A child? I went home and drafted the first chapter, and it began from there. I first got the idea while I was walking through an industrial part of Jersey City, NJ, just across the river from Manhattan. How did you come up with the concept of this book and why pigeons? When her pigeon friend, Burr, is injured and rescued by a retired postal worker, Tully, she must learn to navigate the human world. It’s such a wonderful and wholesome story about a girl who is raised by pigeons in NYC. With us today we have Kaela Noel who is the author of a new middle grade novel, Coo.