Pigeons May Predict Lead Contamination, Study Finds

Amid reignited fears about lead poisoning nationwide, the key to identifying solutions could lie in the common city pigeon.

A study published on Monday in the journal Chemosphere found that Manhattan neighborhoods that had many children with elevated blood lead levels also had pigeons with elevated lead. The research suggests that scientists may be able to use the birds to predict lead contamination in the environment.

The principal author of the study, Rebecca Calisi, who was an assistant biology professor at Barnard College when the research was conducted, examined data on 825 pigeons from various neighborhoods from 2010 to 2015. Dr. Calisi found that elevated lead levels in pigeons from Greenwich Village and SoHo, for example, correlated positively with elevated lead levels in children in those neighborhoods, as identified by New York City’s health department.

The link indicates that pigeons could be used to detect areas of pollution across the country, particularly in urban areas.

“There’s a potential to be able to circumvent health problems in humans before they even begin,” said Dr. Calisi, now an assistant professor at the University of California, Davis.

The researchers drew on data compiled by the Wild Bird Fund, a New York City nonprofit that rehabilitates sick, injured or orphaned birds.

Dr. Calisi recognized that pigeons would be ideal birds for making comparisons with human health, she said, because they live in proximity to people and eat much of the same food. And unlike many other birds, they tend to spend their entire lives within the same square mile.

Whether the information from this study will be practically useful is up for discussion. Christopher R. Miller, press secretary for the health department, said it “seemed a stretch to equate feral pigeons with the proverbial canary in a coal mine” because the city already had a “robust” system for evaluating lead exposure. More than 80 percent of New York City children are tested before age 3, and in 2014, fewer than three out of 1,000 had elevated blood lead levels, the department said.

But for Dr. Calisi, the findings present opportunities that extend well beyond New York — and even lead. Researchers in her lab in California intend to use pigeons to monitor other heavy metals, as well as pesticides and fire retardants, in urban areas worldwide.

“We’re just getting started,” Dr. Calisi said. “This is kind of the beginning of what’s going to be a really big field of study.”

Marc A. Edwards, a professor at Virginia Tech who served as a principal investigator of the lead crisis in Flint, Mich., said the study offered a new way to monitor children’s lead exposure.

“This could be an unusual firsthand mapping of where are the problem areas where we should divert our resources,” he said, adding that the research provided “new insight into how pervasive these toxins are.”