Pigeon-toed and wearing sackcloth

My son was introducing me to his Parisian lifestyle, which meant we were drinking cheap rosé from paper cups on the banks of the Seine.

Suddenly, a man near us grabbed a passing pigeon. We leapt in, appalled, but it turned out he was only trying to save the bird because its claw was tangled up in … wire? Cotton thread? Gut?

No, it was hair: human hair, long, dark strands of it wrapped tightly around those poor pigeon toes.

However, we couldn’t remove it because it was so tight, so ingrained. I ran to a nearby ice cream parlour, desperately making the universal snipping sign for scissors. So while the man held the bird, I cut the hair from its foot using the scissors and a safety pin to pick out the deepest strands.

Beads of blood appeared around one toe as the hair fell away. Another toe had severed completely, but we successfully removed the rest of the knot.

Hair-free, released, the pigeon took off with a joyous whoosh, and probably chronic pins and needles too, as bloodflow returned to its claw.

We’ve all seen birds like it in our cities, one-footed, mangle-toed. Only the day before, I’d fed croissant crumbs to a pigeon hopping around on a stump, its other claw twisted backwards.

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I recalled an article I’d read years previously. Research into avian injuries in cities found birds living in the vicinity of hairdressers were significantly more likely to have feet missing or injured. It’s our hair, long, thin and strong.

That very afternoon I’d walked down a street my son calls “hairdresser alley” and in the blazing heat all the salons had their doors open, and balls of hair – real and fake – puffed like tiny tumbleweeds along the pavement.

So what do we do then with our fallen hair, the tangles in our brushes, the knots in our combs?

Flushing means it ends up accumulating in streams and lakes; binning and burning are pollution issues.

I used to put it in the garden, imagining it feathering birds’ nests – now I fear I was strangling their babies. Small amounts, well spread out and buried, can be composted but will take up to two years to degrade. Meanwhile, I think I’d better make myself a hair shirt.

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