‘I think I’ve just witnessed a wood pigeon end his own life’: Birdwatcher stunned as world’s saddest pigeon throws itself from balcony

Sometimes, you look back on your life and feel melancholic: all the sandwich-eaters you regrettably harassed, all the missed leftovers and crumbs, all the cobblestones you never got to bombard with your excrement, and will never get to. You may pass a pigeon on the street and see it coo with a smile, but behind that coo just might be a whole lot of blue.

This was a discovery that @owen.oj of TikTok made too late when they happened upon one such feathered visitor to their balcony: a visitor presumably armed with all-consuming demons and an inviting patch of dirt a couple of stories below its feet. With the aforementioned dominos all set up, it was the pigeon’s turn to fall, and he wasted no time exuding as much “you’ll miss me when I’m gone” energy as he could muster.

The stage was the perfect tragedy; an impossibly still subject, a devastating operatic drone in the background, one last defiant look at the world (read: sidewalk) that spited him, all ending in a stiff tumble over the edge. That’s one less prospective courier in the now-slightly-darker world, and one more debutante to the darker side of the circle of life.

For those of you wondering, no, the pigeon in question probably isn’t actually dead; what we just witnessed was likely a bold, dramatic takeoff that ended with the pigeon spreading its wings, taking a glide of indeterminate length, and stopping at the first curly fry or earthworm he came across. I assure you that the public is doing everything it can for the sake of pigeon mental health, which is to say that we are not and probably never will be equipped to engage with such a thing at all, and I profoundly doubt that the pigeons would take us up on such an opportunity anyway.

Granted, harassing anyone who just got Quiznos to go isn’t the sign of a well-adjusted individual, but hey, we all have our vices.