The cycling infrastructure in the Netherlands is fantastic, and cyclists in my hometown of Utrecht would have been the happiest in the world if it wasn’t for one thing: pigeons.
One moment you’re pedalling in the sun with a cool breeze in your face, and the next you’re breaking and swerving. A pigeon casually strolled onto your path, seemingly oblivious to the danger it put itself in. Growing up, I often wondered just how stupid they must be to blindly walk into traffic. Many years later, I found myself once again puzzling over pigeon intellect, but this time in a new paper in the journal PLOS Biology on collective intelligence and flight paths.
