By ANN ALLEN
Indiana Correspondent

ALEXANDRIA, Egypt — The tourists making the 130-mile bus trip from the busy port of Alexandria to Cairo for their first look at Egypt’s famed pyramids found the landscape confusing – a place where desert and fields of olive and fig trees meet in a dusty, almost olive-drab collage.

Even more confusing were the structures they saw at nearly every farm. Definitely not pyramids and smaller than silos, they reminded some of rockets and others of ears of corn on steroids. Finally, someone asked the tour guide to explain.

“They’re pigeonholes,” she said. Laughing at startled expressions, she quickly added, “Pigeons don’t nest in trees; they want holes. The farmer creates the holes, and the pigeons use them as nests. Then the farmer takes out the pigeons and sells them to restaurants in Cairo.”

While she went on to remind American visitors that “your country has pigeonholes – they are in desks,” most of the tourists crinkled their noses at the idea of eating a pigeon, a bird widely known as being dirty, carrying disease and wreaking havoc with statues and business buildings.

Some may have thought of pigeons trained as carriers or racers but, judging by their expressions, no one was thinking food. In Egypt, where 94 percent of the land is desert and nearly 20 percent of the population lives below the poverty level, however, raising pigeons provides a family staple while representing additional income.

The tour guide made it sound as if farmers woo wild pigeons into their carefully constructed clay penthouses, but in reality they are following practices in effect for thousands of years in Egypt and the Middle East: Raising domesticated birds for food.

Part of the guide’s explanation was true. Farmers do remove pigeons for their own use or to sell. The pigeon houses she referred to as pigeonholes are built large enough for a farmer to enter them from below to pluck out the birds he wants, plump adolescents ranging from one to two months in age. (Pigeon young don’t leave their nests until they have reached their adult size.)

Referred to as squab in some parts of the world, including the United States, roast pigeon is one of Egypt’s few delicacies – served stuffed with rice, cracked wheat, cumin and cinnamon, often with its head hidden inside the stuffing. Others serve it flattened like road kill and grilled. Either way, it is considered a delightful, all-dark meat treat to be savored.

In addition to their value as food, pigeons have an important byproduct: The excrement that covers statues and etches concrete buildings in urban settings can be used as fertilizer. That’s important in a country where private ownership of land was reintroduced more than 50 years ago, following a revolution that reshaped the economy.

While farmers do not have to pay for water used in irrigation as they attempt to turn desert lands into tillable acres, they still need fertilizer for their small farms, many of which are only five acres in size.

In a harsh land where only 15 percent of the population works on farms, Egypt’s agricultural sector remains one of the most productive in the world. While tractors occasionally dot the drive between Egypt’s two largest cities, donkeys and horses are almost as common as the pigeonholes pointing upward as they have for thousands of years – beckoning new birds and additional income.