I was out walking around this morning. It wasn’t hot yet, and the air didn’t seem too awful.

(Actually, the weather has been quite livable, the past 2-3 days. Last night it was almost cool. Which was cool.)

I have come down with a cold — the Olympic Cold, but a week early; what’s up with that? — and I know old-time coaches used to suggest you could sweat out a cold. (Or was that a “fever” you could sweat out?)

Anyway, the grounds at the Beijing Conference Center are quite picturesque, as I have mentioned. Aside from two areas. And I saw a queer sight, as I was slogging along.

The first eyesore of an area is the workers’ quarters, on the eastern end of the grounds. That’s where the guys (and they all seem to be guys) who do menial labor are housed. It’s a depressing building, with no air-conditioning (every window and door is left open) and about 50 pairs of shoes near the door, meaning a bunch of guys live in there.

The second eyesore of a spot on the grounds is an old, one-story building on the western edge of the grounds. It’s low-slung, maybe about 100 feet long, and it has vertical windows along the eastern wall.

I feared it was another depressing shed for the menial laborers to live … but I had never seen any of them around there.

So I had come to believe it was just uninhabited.

Anyway, going near it today, about 75 yards away … and one worker is there, opening the windows. One by one, from left to right.

And that’s when the birds started flying out of the building. Hundreds of them. Pigeons, it looked like. White pigeons. Tearing out of the building like prisoners set free.

They went zooming to the east. Maybe just trying to get some ground between their overnight prison and the open sky?

Anyway, the Beijing Conference Center staff must somehow lure all the pigeons back into the building, at night. Maybe they put out a bunch of bird seed, and the birds come get it, even though they will be locked up overnight?

Now that I think of it, I’ve seen almost no sign of bird excrement on the sidewalks or roads. And perhaps that is a function of rounding up all the birds every night?

They probably aid with keeping the insent population down, during the day. That’s mostly what birds eat, right? Insects?

The Chinese have some history with working birds. I remember the children’s book about “Ping”, the duck who fished for the Chinese man. Captain Kangaroo used to read it every few months.

The key points were … the ducks were let loose on the river/lake, but with rings around their necks. They could catch fish, but they couldn’t swallow them, and the fisherman would fetch the fish from the ducks’ beaks.

At the end of the day, at some signal, the ducks were expected to return to the man’s boat, and the last duck up the plank was swatted on the bottom — to encourage it to be faster, next time.

In the book, “Ping” realizes he/she will be the last duck up the plank, chooses not to go on the boat at all, to avoid the swat … and then has far too much adventure during the night, and vows (as I recall; this is 45 years ago)  that he/she will always get back on the boat, even if it means getting swatted.

So, maybe the pigeons are fed and housed for a reason. To eat insects.

At least no people are forced to live in that building the birds flew out from. It is an even more depressing sight than the place where I know the low-level workers live.