Digital Academy Allows Time for the Flock

For Lily Rieman, a high school junior living on the outskirts of Bloomington, the typical school day isn’t so ordinary. First, Lily doesn’t attend your traditional four-year high school. Her days are spent engrossed in live video classes for the Indiana Gateway Digital Academy (INGDA).

Even then, there is something more unusual about her presence. It’s the company she keeps. Perched on her shoulder is a small, speckled homing pigeon named Merlin, after the magician of legend. Like her wizard namesake, Merlin adds a touch of magic to Lily’s days — days filled with resilience, responsibility, and a nontraditional path, days spent caring for and raising pigeons.

Lily has always loved animals. However, her caring for unique creatures has evolved over time. It seems Lily often follows a different path than her peers. Her connection with birds started with backyard chickens, but pigeons weren’t part of the original gameplan. During Covid, with more time on her hands, she wanted a different challenge.

First, she tried talking her parents into letting her take care of a lizard. When that didn’t happen, she was turned onto falconry by a family friend. But her parents remained leery of the feasibility of such an undertaking.

Though falconry sounded a bit advanced for an elementary school kid, the same family friend advised her to build up to that point. His suggestion: “Get some pigeons. If you can handle pigeons, then that’s your first step.”

That suggestion flipped the switch. With Lily’s love for birds and demonstrated responsible nature, her parents quickly came on board. Soon after, Lily made contact with a local pigeon breeder, beginning with six birds. Her flock has since blossomed to over two dozen.

Though arguably less challenging than falcons, pigeons aren’t passive backyard pets. Their care requires real work that includes daily feeding, cleaning, and health monitoring, not to mention the art of managing a complex social flock. Lily does all this before classes.

Throughout the day she also “spot cleans” the coop, tops off the birds’ feed, and checks for eggs. When she isn’t looking to grow the flock, she replaces the eggs with fakes to manage its size.

Most important among her duties, however, is the observation. By watching the birds eat and interact, she can spot “weird behavior” and early signs of illness, alerting her to potential problems before a serious issue takes root. This requires time, patience, and attention.

Despite all the work, for Lily, caring for her birds is more than labor — it’s her passion. Because, according to Lily, pigeons are far cooler than most people give them credit for.

“It’s actually really fun to watch them all interact,” Lily says. “They're super social. They’ll do puffing and little dances to each other.”

Puffing is common behavior wherein birds fluff their feathers and trap air in their chests, puffing themselves up. It serves various purposes, including thermoregulation, communication, and displaying dominance or courtship, as mating, for pigeons, is serious business.

“They mate for life,” Lily explains. “Both parents contribute to raising the babies. That is really fun to see. You can tell there’s a social hierarchy and the little ones have to learn it.”

For Lily, the coolest thing about the pigeons is their near-mystical sense of direction. Renowned for their “homing instinct,” they can be released hundreds of miles away and still find their way back. This ability is something scientists have yet to fully explain. It’s also one of Lily’s biggest challenges.

When her family moved from their original house to a new location, the pigeons kept flying back to the old address, sitting on the roof, waiting for a home that no longer existed. “We had to go rescue them from their empty loft,” Lily recalls.

The ultimate test came with a second, much farther move. Lily kept the birds cooped up for nearly eight months to re-home them. Even after that lengthy period, the first time they were released, they took off for the old property, requiring a 20-minute drive to go get them. The dedication required to get them back was immense, involving dangerous, late-night rescue missions.

“I would have to climb up on top of the loft because you can’t really catch them in the daytime,” she says. Through perseverance, she eventually cemented their new address in the birds’ collective memory, redirecting instinct with consistent effort.

Yet, Lily’s passion demands time, which is next to impossible to carve out with a traditional high school experience. That kind of rigid schedule was the biggest challenge to raising a successful flock, and the demands soon became overwhelming.

“It was awful. I could not,” Lily said about that time. A school day not only kept her away from her birds, but the time spent on homework was also crippling. “I spent seven hours after school typically, on just homework, which is ridiculous,” she explained. This left her with almost no time for her birds, her friends, or any other outside activities.

The pressure came to a head when she had to nurse an injured baby pigeon back to health. The care and feeding schedule was so demanding that her mom had to take over, leaving Lily feeling disconnected and frustrated.

That’s when a solution presented itself in INGDA, a public, state-wide online school structured around live video classes that mimic a brick-and-mortar schedule. With such flexibility, Lily has thrived.

“It's been great,” she said. “I can raise birds. I can have extracurricular. I can see my friends even.”

Now, her school day can be built around the needs of her flock. She attends class, takes care of her birds, and then returns to her studies. This setup also affords her time in the afternoon to observe during “free-flight time” to ensure the pigeons are safe from predators like Cooper’s hawks and foxes. Such freedom allows her to fully dedicate herself to her passion without the fear of falling behind in school.

Without such flexibility, she wouldn’t have been able to provide Merlin with the care she required, and she would have lost the emotional center of the flock.

Merlin almost didn’t make it and likely wouldn’t have without near-constant care. Only a week old when she was severely wounded from predation, she had to be hand-raised. While Merlin healed and eventually moved outside to the main coop, the attachment Lily felt toward her was permanent and afforded her special privileges.

She’s the only one of the flock who regularly comes inside to visit, for example, wearing a special pigeon diaper for indoor stays. While Lily has brought in several other injured pigeons over the years, they mostly returned to their outdoor lives. Merlin, however, is more bonded to the house than the family cat.

“Merlin is the only one that will appreciate the house,” she says. “She just likes to come in and chill with me inside.”

While the home is warmer and more inviting than the coop, it’s not the comfort she desires. It’s Lily.