Happily, Vikings soon raided the city and tore it down—along with most of London. The pigeons loved the Vikings, who didn’t care for tall buildings and left tasty garbage all over the place. But after some years the Vikings went away and the steeple-builders got to work again. They chose a high hill overlooking the river and constructed a massive cathedral there, one that dwarfed everything that had come before it. They named it Saint Paul’s. Time and time again the pigeons tried to burn it down, but the humans had dedicated a small army of firefighters to the protection of the cathedral, and the pigeons’ every effort was thwarted.

Frustrated and angry, the pigeons began setting fires in adjacent neighborhoods, at places upwind from the cathedral on gusty nights, in hopes the flames would spread. Early on the morning of September 2, 1666, their efforts were disastrously successful. A pigeon named Nesmith set fire to a bakery a half mile from Saint Paul’s. As the bakery was consumed, a ferocious wind pushed the flames straight uphill toward the cathedral. It burned completely—naves, belfries, and all—and after four days of destruction, so had eighty-seven other churches and more than ten thousand homes. The city was a smoking ruin.16

The pigeons hadn’t envisioned such devastation, and they felt genuinely bad about it. Emotionally, it was a different thing altogether from the Viking raids. Though the damage was comparable, this was their fault entirely. They called a meeting and debated whether to leave London altogether. Perhaps, some argued, they did not deserve to live there anymore. The vote was split, and they decided to return the following day and debate the matter again. That night the revenge attacks began. There was a contingent of humans who seemed to understand that pigeons were to blame for the fire, and had decided to drive them out. They soaked bread crumbs in arsenic and tried to poison the pigeons. They cut down the pigeons’ favorite roosting trees and destroyed their nests. They chased pigeons with brooms and bats and shot at them with muskets. After that, not a single pigeon was willing to leave the city; they were too proud. Instead they voted to fight back again.

The pigeons pecked and pooped and spread disease and did everything they could to make the humans miserable. In turn, the humans ratcheted up their violence against the birds. Truthfully, the pigeons couldn’t do much more than annoy the humans, but when the humans started to rebuild the cathedral—the very symbol of their arrogance—the pigeons waged all-out war. Thousands of them descended on the construction site, risking life and wing to chase away the workers. Day after day, pitched battles were waged between the humans and the birds, and no matter how many pigeons the humans killed, more always seemed to come. They reached a stalemate. Construction ground to a halt; it seemed there would never be another cathedral on the site of Saint Paul’s, and that the pigeons of London would be harassed and killed forever.