Chloé Roubert has been to Paris, London, Montreal, Toronto, Shanghai, Frankfurt, and New York, cultivating herself as a pigeon scholar. “I’m kind of following my pigeons,” she said on a recent morning on Stanton Street, in lower Manhattan. “My home is everywhere, because they are everywhere.”

Roubert, who is thirty-one, was in town scouting locations for her latest endeavor: a pigeon tour of the Lower East Side for the New Museum’s “Ideas City” festival, which starts today. She has pale skin and dark hair flecked with gray. She wears thick-rimmed glasses and, that day, a trench coat. For the past year, she has been wandering through the neighborhood, noting pigeon behavior, taking photographs, and talking to the people who linger on the street—those feeding and watching and growing attached to the birds, leaving the occasional can of cat food (accepted, though pigeons don’t usually eat meat) or dumping out an unfinished loaf of bread (a crowd forms, and there’s a long wait for a spot around the crust). She has found that pigeons, like many New Yorkers, are bagel-eaters, immigrants, and scavengers, and are put off by new high-rises that are inhospitably spiffy.

Obsession with pigeons suggests a lost soul gone kooky, though Roubert came to them via the academic route, and she receives funding to enable her pigeon-chasing projects. Born in Paris, she was educated, until she was eleven, at the American School, and then attended college in Montreal and graduate school in London; she has a hard-to-place accent. When, more than a year ago, Roubert was working as an applied anthropologist, she was sent on a six-month business trip to Shanghai. She doesn’t speak Chinese, and in those quiet days she became a keen noticer. She rode her bike around, watching pigeons. “When they live together in coops, they’ll actually fly in these beautiful groups,” she said. “Whenever you would see groups of pigeons flying in Shanghai, you would know that right under them were these old neighborhoods called shikumen.” Roubert quit her job and devoted herself to pigeons full time.

As she walked through Manhattan, she stopped on First Street, across from a red brick building, and inspected the windows above the Juice Press. Pigeons arrived in North America in the early sixteen hundreds, when the Dutch brought them—a good source of protein—from the cliffs on the coast of the Mediterranean. She gestured up. “This, for them, is a cliff,” she said. “They don’t need trees to nest, they just need ledges.” A few steps down the street, Roubert pointed out a building with a rotisserie place on the first floor. There were thin metal spikes attached to the windowsills. “If you look at these facades, a lot of them have picks.” Roubert raised an eyebrow, watching the birds inspect the sills. “They’re kind of in this limbo zone—pigeons have no use at all, for anything,” she said. “They kind of represent ourselves. What we used to be. We brought them over, now we dislike them, and they’re kind of the mirror of things that we don’t want to deal with.”

The tour will begin at Sara D. Roosevelt Park, where sparrows hide out in traffic-light poles. “In New York, pigeons are not protected by the law,” Roubert said. “In parks, you’re not allowed to feed them. You’re not allowed to kill them, either, but you’re allowed to kill them on private property.” She crossed the street. Pigeons historically ate grain; now they take what they can get. “What pigeons eat—bagels—are pretty nutritious food,” she said. “Chickens eat all this weird antibiotic stuff. Probably not so great.” She enjoys squab. “You’ll tell people you like to eat pigeon, and they’re like, ‘Oh my God, that’s gross!’ ”

Coops used to be everywhere in the East Village. People would bring pigeons over to a friend’s roof and watch them fly home. But rooftop coops were flimsy, and they’ve largely disappeared from Manhattan. Brooklyn still has a lively scene, and in Bed Stuy, especially, there’s something of a pigeon fraternity—“It’s a boys’ club,” Roubert said. A shop called Broadway Pigeon serves as their headquarters. “It’s become this kind of social place, where people meet up, kind of like a dog park.” She added, “The dog is the pet of the future. The pigeon is the pet of the past.”

On Avenue A, Roubert rang the bell of her friend Anton Van Dalen, an artist in his seventies, who keeps a coop on his roof that is said to be the last in the neighborhood. He stuck his head out from the window above: a bright blue cap and glasses reflecting the sun. Van Dalen keeps a livestream of his pigeons, and when he lets them fly—usually around five o’clock in the afternoon—they circle above in a feathery ballet. He breeds only white ones. “I’ve been doing it since I was a child, like twelve years old,” he said. “I grew up in Holland, and then I was in Canada for years—so it was always part of my life. They were my companions as a child, and they still are. It’s generations later, of course. I went to Broadway Pigeon yesterday, to get some feed. It’s always been an immigrant hobby. So when you go to these places, they’re all immigrants, like I am. Except at this place they’re all from the Middle East. Many of them are from Pakistan, India.” Roubert nodded. “We all live in some kind of a ghetto,” he added, “And the pigeons have been kind of like a passport.”

Pigeons are socially monogamous, Roubert explained—they mate for life, but they can have flings. The males puff up and leap on the females, who sometimes try to flee, but the whole thing is over with pretty quickly. Pigeons don’t fight to protect themselves—the most they’d do is swat an aggressor away with a wing. “Pigeons are actually doves,” Roubert likes to say. “They’re exactly the same animal, except doves are white.” That is, they belong to the classification Columbidae, which includes more than three hundred species, each a little different: there are red ones, gray ones, birds with white collars, some have iridescent feathers. There are pigeon beauty pageants that are not jokes.

“They have really good vision and memory,” Roubert said. “They actually see more images than humans. If they were to go to the movies, for instance, they would see blank images, because they see more images per second than we do.” But pigeons don’t live so long in New York—their typical lifespan is two and a half years—elsewhere, they can live to be six. They don’t migrate; they stay where they were born, and if they’re brought elsewhere, they fly back. Homing pigeons, which can return from great distances, are the ones that are sometimes trained to race, or to be carriers—like Cher Ami, a French bird that served in the U.S. Army during the First World War before she got shot by the Germans and retired to Florida. A couple of years ago, a pigeon bred for racing sold to a Chinese businessman for four hundred thousand dollars. The other day, the price of an uncooked pigeon on Mott Street was $11.50.