Astoria, Oregon…. A town that smells like old beer, river fog, and the burnt-out dreams of longshoremen. The pigeons know this better than anyone. You can see it in their beady little eyes, hunkered down on the power lines like some kind of feathery jury waiting to deliver the verdict. Guilty. Always guilty.

Three of them in this shot.. Scraggly veterans of the city skies, puffed up against the damp coastal air. One stares straight ahead like it’s seen the truth and decided it isn’t worth mentioning. Another hangs back, playing coy, waiting for the next scrap of bread or the next sucker dumb enough to drop a French fry. The middle one, battered and scarred like a street brawler with wings. Looks ready to fight the entire Columbia River if it dares to rise.

The buildings behind them are washed in that Astoria gold, the fading grandeur of a port town that once mattered to the world and now mostly serves tourists who think Goonies nostalgia can buy them a ticket out of reality. But the pigeons aren’t buying it. They’ve been here longer than the movie geeks, the hipster coffee drinkers, the art gallery gawkers. They’ve seen this place drunk at midnight and soaked in rain at dawn. They are the true locals, wired into the cracked brick and sea-salt air like little winged hustlers who know the score.

Astoria doesn’t hide its scars. Neither do these birds. They wear the rust, the damp, the hunger. They perch on the black veins of electricity that snake through the town, watching the circus go on below them. Watching us scurry, consume, collapse.

And maybe that’s the joke: the pigeons always win. They’ll outlive our revolutions, our rent hikes, our waterfront developments. Long after the last beer can rolls down Marine Drive, they’ll still be here, ugly, stubborn, defiant. Perched on the wires, laughing their guttural pigeon laugh at the ruins of our little human carnival.