Hey all,

As the sun sets, I’d thought I’d begin by writing about why this website exists - and yeah, it started with a very massive pigeon.

Really, the idea came during a trip to Ireland with a friend. Sitting in Eyre Square, Galway, we were waiting for a coach to take us back to the airport when my friend suddenly exclaimed, “Hey, that’s a massive pigeon!”.

I turned around and sure enough…. it was a massive pigeon.

It was really in that moment, in a pure Archimedes eureka moment, inspiration struck. “That’s a great idea for a website!”, I exclaimed to my disinterested friend, who was far more interested in how this giant pigeon was walking.

Sitting by the airport gates on the cold, marble flooring of the Aerfort na Sionainne, we started brainstorming what the website was about. The concept was simple: a Pinterest-style gallery where people could share photos of massive pigeons.

As a side note I’ve always, always loved birds - they’re super fascinating and diverse. This love extends to pigeons as well, and it wasn’t really until I started building this site that I fully understood their rich history with humans and how underappreciated they are. 

They’re seen as “rats of the sky”, but I’m always so here to cheer for the underdog that I’ve always wanted to give them their moment in the sun too. 

I could probably talk for hours about this, but maybe part of that comes from seeing a bit of myself in them. Growing up as a fairly unremarkable South East Asian male in England in the 1990’s I was often sidelined, so I can relate to being overlooked. So I think there’s part of me as well that wanted to build this website.

The first thing you’ll notice on the site is our mascot, Millie the Pigeon. I’ve always wanted to create a cute mascot character (absolutely love a ton of them). We kind of wanted to give her a fun, whimsical anime lighthearted design to have a fun, welcoming and not overly serious ffeel. Chatting to people it seems like a lot of people respond well to her - so I hope you do too! A few people have been asking for merchandise, so it’s something I’m considering…

The site itself is built around a masonry style gallery, where anyone (including you!) can submit a photo of a pigeon, using Bluesky. You simply upload your picture with the hashtag #thatsamassivepigeon, and our AI model checks whether it’s a pigeon or not.

As I write this in September 2025 and AI is currently the buzzword at the moment - extremely tiring from my perspective and comes with a heap of considerations (and also probably reading this text).

To keep it really simple - we built our own small, efficient image classifier. Its entire job is to detect whether an image is a pigeon.

If it is, it appears on the site. If not, it doesn’t. 

We decided on this because I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life manually checking pigeon photos (as lovely as that’d be!). It’s not going to be perfect all the time, which means we can manually get rid of images - but we’ll keep on making improvements to it over time.

The sustainability of it all is really important to me. I feel that the site should be a celebration of pigeons, and bringing people together to upload photos of it - so I feel anything that detracts from that wouldn’t fit the theme of the site. Another blog post will probably be around how we did this.

This website doesn’t run really without people like you, so I think looking ahead I’d love to add something here that really helps celebrate pigeons, and the people who love them.

I’ve got some availability to explore some ideas, so if you have any ideas let me know. 🙂

If you’ve read this far then I guess you’re somewhat invested so if you get a chance, do snap and upload a picture of a pigeon you spot. 

I’d like to use further blog posts to talk more about the “making of”, but also exploring a bit more about people and pigeons, so expect it to be a bit citizen-journalist of me as I go about in doing that.

Meanwhile, I’ll catch you all soon and I can’t wait to see your photos.

Much love,

Tom x