I feel like the only reason people are losing weight is because eating 20 potatoes in a day is insane and no one on this diet is hitting their BMR. Of course they will lose weight and they will with any variation that keeps them under their BMR.
The typical pigeon you see in cities are rock doves which are introduced. There probably weren’t as many when they had to compete with passenger pigeons. Mourning Doves are pretty similar to passenger pigeons and are very common too, they are still hunted to this day.
I think thats a bit pessimistic. I am sure it would be possible to bake these prompts into the model but if this is equally effective and much less effort to do it this way, why is it an issue?