An oft overlooked wonder of the urban wilderness, the common pigeon is much more than it appears, with a rich history of aristocratic breeding dating back centuries.

Photographer and native New Yorker Andrew Garn has spent years documenting these creaturing and collecting them into a book titled The New York Pigeon: Behind the Feathers to share their “personalities, expressiveness, glorious feather iridescence, and deeply hued eyes.”

Birds that used to be exchanged between the wealthy as gifts have grown to have different associations, and created a whole industry of pigeon defense systems for urban architecture.

The goal of Garn’s work is, in part, to cast them in a different light (both literally and otherwise), showing the elegance of these creatures when taken out of everyday contexts where some find them to be annoying pests.

Some shots put subjects against dark backgrounds, focusing the viewer necessarily on the birds themselves. Others put them in their urban contexts, highlighting them in flight or perched on windows.

For more on the history of this adaptive series, check out this episode of 99% Invisible. And for more photographs of pigeons at all stages of their lives, see Garn’s website or buy the book.

Some sit individually in trees while are clustered in sets, branching out like leaves on a building facade or hung like ivy off the sides of structures, but all of these diverse birdhouses share something in common: a single creative mind that has been working on them for years.

Street artist and designer Thomas Dambo’s Happy City Birds project is an ongoing ode to both cities and their avian inhabitants. He specializes in recycled artworks for humans as well as animals, ranging from small interventions like these to huge climbable sculptures.

Started in 2006, “the idea for Happy City Birds sprung from Thomas being a former graffiti artist, and was looking for a way to do street art in a positive way, that everyone can understand.” As with his other projects, these “birdhouses are made from recycled materials and scrap wood.”

His artist statements, like his kid-friendly creations, are not without a sense of childlike wonder and good humor. “One day Thomas felt that he wanted to know how it was to be a bird, so he built a giant birdhouse that he could hang out in. The house he build solely using recycled materials and put it up near Dronning Louises bridge in Copenhagen.”

A lot of these birdhouses are located in Arken, Denmark but they are also spread across other cities including Copenhagen, Aarhus, Odense, Horsens, Beirut and Berlin.

Lunar Cycles is a massive site-specific installation featuring 15,000 paper-crafted birds in the 13th arrondissement of France’s capital city, requiring (non-paper) cranes to hang the elaborate avian collage.

Created by French street artist Mademoiselle Maurice in collaboration with Mathgoth Gallery, the work represents the biggest mural Paris has ever seen, a massive flight of birds landing on a 20,000-square-foot wall.

The artwork was installed on a condemned building, allowing the artist to first apply a layer of black paint as a backdrop for the colorful array of geometric paper birds added to the wall. She also painted on a series of two-dimensional origamic patterns to bridge between the physical papers and flat surface.

The artist notes that the neighborhood contributed to the design, including those most impacted but the upcoming demolition of this long-standing structural pillar of the community. Previous projects from Maurice have featured similar themes in other settings, from birds and other geometric origami shapes gracing the walls of city streets and ancient castles alike. This work will be up through August.