THERE’S A REASON Woody Allen once dubbed pigeons the rats of the sky. They’re filthy. They poop on everything, and that stuff can carry disease. And they pester you mercilessly, especially when you’re just trying to eat a sandwich. Everyone knows they’re gross.
Well, almost everyone. Photographer Mårten Lange loves them, and says pigeons aren’t the problem, cities are. “Pigeons are dirty because cities are dirty,” says Lange, whose book, Citizen, features striking black-and-white portraits of Columba livia domestica. “So if you find them disgusting, look around you.”
The Swedish photographer, who has made similarlystunning portraits of crows in Tokyo, started photographing pigeons while living in London last year. He was drawn to how they struggle, much like humans, to overcome the challenges of a hostile cityscape. Each day presents a number of dangers: flying into a window, being eaten by a cat, losing a toe to those bits of string that always seem to wind around their feet. “These birds are very often quite beat up, dirty, crippled and just sad, but they never give up,” he says.
Click to Open Overlay GalleryCitizen, Études Books, 2015. MÅRTEN LANGE
Though pigeons typically gather in flocks, Lange shot them individually using a long lens to blur the background and an on-camera flash to make the birds look like cut-outs. Given that pigeons are essentially fearless, getting close was no problem. “The flash would make them twitch sometimes, but they were quite indifferent to being photographed,” Lange says.
The whimsical portraits look like they were made in a studio. Each bird appears surprisingly unique and regal, its eyes and gestures communicating emotions like fear, anger, playfulness, and contentment. You almost expect them to talk. “They are individuals,” Lange says, “just like us.”
Maybe he’s right. Pigeons are pretty smart, after all. And they’re industrious, capable of finding their way home across great distances—a trait that made them particularly useful for communication during the First and Second World Wars. Charles Darwin and Nikola Tesla both loved them. And they can actually be quite beautiful, as Lange’s photographs show. But the photographer isn’t trying to make anyone love pigeons, only appreciate them as something more than flying rats. “I’m just pointing to a correlation between our lives and theirs,” he says. “Our habitat is their habitat.”
About Pigeon Patrol:
Pigeon Patrol Products & Services is the leading manufacturer and distributor of bird deterrent (control) products in Canada. Pigeon Patrol products have solved pest bird problems in industrial, commercial, and residential settings since 2000, by using safe and humane bird deterrents with only bird and animal friendly solutions. At Pigeon Patrol, we manufacture and offer a variety of bird deterrents, ranging from Ultra-flex Bird Spikes with UV protection, Bird Netting, 4-S Gel and the best Ultrasonic and audible sound devices on the market today.
Voted Best Canadian wholesaler for Bird Deterrent products four years in a row.
Downtown Chicago, where I spend most of my time, has beggars on nearly every corner.
Many of them have regular perches, like fishermen with favorite spots. Others, more creative – and usually more crafty – seem to wander around instead. But except for the licensed sellers of Streetwise and a truly unfortunate few, most of them are hustlers.
The legless Viet Nam veteran whose bare stumps stick out beneath his shorts as he sits, head hung in discouragement, at the corner of Adams and LaSalle Streets is truly unfortunate, a man who gave his legs for a country that turned its back on him when he came home from an unpopular war.
So is the rather lively but elderly fellow who stands outside the Walgreen’s at 200 West Adams Street cheerily chirping “have a nice day’ to all who pass, hoping without asking that someone will slip him a few bucks to help him through the day. It seems likely he is mentally challenged.
But most of the rest I encounter are frauds and tricksters.
Take, for example (please!) the ubiquitous white college-age beggars who prop themselves against lampposts with hand-lettered “homeless” signs while drinking their morning Starbuck’s coffees and reading their Kierkegaard and Karl Marx. If they’re not college students raising beer money or leftovers from the last Lollapalooza, Grateful Dead concert, or “Occupy” protest then I’ll eat the “School of the Art Institute” T-shirts right off their backs.
Some panhandlers are quite creative, even entertaining. A roving trickster most often seen in the vicinity of South Michigan Avenue does quite a good Shakespeare rendition while greeting potential victims with a flourish and a “Greetings, kind sir! Prithee, may I have word with you?”
Perhaps my favorite, for their brazenness and gall, are those who approach with the desperate plea: “I don’t want your money; may I please just ask you a question?” “Sure, what’s your question?” “May I please have some money?” No, you may not.
I’ve been taken in more than a few times, though, because I’m what you might deride as a “compassionate” conservative. Although I truly believe that it’s better to teach someone how to fish than simply to give him one, I’ll sometimes give a hungry person a fish nonetheless. Almost always I regret it later. For the more elaborate the story, the more likely it isn’t true.
A young, tall African-American clad in red and white basketball warm-ups and size sixteen shoes approached me one cold, dark Christmas Eve, tears streaming down his obviously distressed face. “What’s wrong with people in this town?” he lamented. “Everybody sees a seven foot tall black man approaching them and they run away.” I didn’t.
His spiel was that he’d missed the University of Oklahoma basketball team bus back to Norman after a game in Chicago and needed $85.00 to get home for the holidays. Of course, he would repay me once he got there. He was tall enough and wearing the right colors, but when I tried to flag down a passing police cruiser to help out, he bolted. According to that evening’s sports roundup, the Oklahoma Sooners were playing in the Chaminade Classic in Honolulu , 4246 miles away from Chicago.
Another supposed college student, an agitated young white man, insisted one Labor Day weekend evening that his wallet had been stolen when he fell asleep on the CTA. He, too, needed cash to get home, in this case for a train to South Bend to meet his father who would drive him back to Indiana University. He even had a police report documenting the supposed robbery.
I left him with the doorman in my building lobby while I called the local precinct, which verified that a person by that name had indeed filed such a report. A quick Internet search revealed an IU student by that name. Still, I knew almost immediately that I’d been taken from the look in his eyes and the speed with which he fled when he grabbed the $70.00 from my hands. A week or so later a Chicago Tribune columnist wrote about having been taken in by the exact same scam.
I could tell you about the pregnant woman and her husband who’d been burned out of their home (he had scorch marks on his had to prove it) for whom I bought $60.00 worth of groceries, the fellow with the scar on his forearm just out of prison who took me for $40.00 for the magazine subscriptions that never arrived, or the kid with the fake UNICEF ID who scowled when I gave him a check (which never cleared) instead of cash when he came collecting door-to-door. I could even tell you about the construction worker who needed fifty or sixty bucks to get home because his truck had blown its starter – three nights in a row – but I won’t.
Just don’t feed the pigeons when you come to Chicago, especially if they’ve got a story to sell. You might just turn out to be one.
About Pigeon Patrol:
Pigeon Patrol Products & Services is the leading manufacturer and distributor of bird deterrent (control) products in Canada. Pigeon Patrol products have solved pest bird problems in industrial, commercial, and residential settings since 2000, by using safe and humane bird deterrents with only bird and animal friendly solutions. At Pigeon Patrol, we manufacture and offer a variety of bird deterrents, ranging from Ultra-flex Bird Spikes with UV protection, Bird Netting, 4-S Gel and the best Ultrasonic and audible sound devices on the market today.
Voted Best Canadian wholesaler for Bird Deterrent products four years in a row.
Birds of prey are to be used to scare nuisance seagulls and other pest scavenger birds away from a Galway landfill site.
The problem of seagulls and other pest birds is so great at the East Galway Landfill in Kilconnell, Galway County Council is looking for birds of prey to aid in curbing the nuisance.
The local authority has sought tenders for bird control services at the landfill site near Ballinasloe. The successful bidder will be asked to use deterrents, including birds of prey such as falcons and eagles, “to deter pest bird species form causing nuisance at the landfill site”.
In conjunction with the use of birds of prey, artificial deterrents such as balloons, kites and distress callers will be used to combat the problem of nuisance birds at the landfill.
The deterrents must be used when the contractor is on site, and when the contractor is not on site in order to comply with bird control conditions set-out in the waste licence for the facility.
Using birds of prey is considered an environmentally friendly way of combating the problem of seagulls and pest birds at landfill sites.
Gulls and other birds feeding at landfill waste sites can cause problems for neighbours of the site as well as to people working at the landfill, and flight paths.
According to the County Council, the successful company must fly birds of prey as a deterrent at the site every day that the contractor is present.
According to the Environmental Protection Agency, scavenger birds such as starlings, crows, blackbirds, and gulls are most commonly associated with active landfills.
They can be a nuisance, transfer pathogens, litter and scraps to neighbouring areas and also be a hazard to aircraft. The EPA said, in its guidelines, that some birds resident on landfills are protected species and this protection must be respected at all times.
In recent weeks seagulls, in particular, have received bad press. In England, gulls have been hitting the headlines for all the wrong reason and the Prime Minister, David Cameron called for a ‘big conversation’ on aggressive menace gulls, which he encounters at Cornwall.
In Ireland, Fianna Fáil senator, Ned O’Sullivan last year said swooping seagulls were a scourge in Dublin, attacking young people and causing a raucous racket at night contributing to residents’ sleep deprivation.
His party colleague in the senate, Denis O’Donovan, last week called for a cull of seagulls because they were becoming a pest and nuisance.
About Pigeon Patrol:
Pigeon Patrol Products & Services is the leading manufacturer and distributor of bird deterrent (control) products in Canada. Pigeon Patrol products have solved pest bird problems in industrial, commercial, and residential settings since 2000, by using safe and humane bird deterrents with only bird and animal friendly solutions. At Pigeon Patrol, we manufacture and offer a variety of bird deterrents, ranging from Ultra-flex Bird Spikes with UV protection, Bird Netting, 4-S Gel and the best Ultrasonic and audible sound devices on the market today.
Voted Best Canadian wholesaler for Bird Deterrent products four years in a row.
The downtown area of the city of Fredericton is missing thousands of feathered residents.
Areas that would normally roost hundreds of pigeons are now empty.
The city says it has not worked to remove the birds and says their absence is concerning.
“I haven’t seen too many pigeons around,” said by-law officer Don Veysey who has worked on the by-laws concerning the birds in the past.
“I’ve been checking a few areas around where we have been having problems with pigeons in the past and I’ve noticed that there is just none around.”
Don Veysey
Fredericton bylaw officer Don Veysey has worked on pigeon bylaws in the past. (Shane Fowler/CBC)
Veysey says to his knowledge there has been no major project to rid the downtown of the birds and it may be something the city should look into.
“That is something to be concerned with,” said Veysey. “Pigeons are a natural phenomenon, they’ve been around here for hundreds of years. It could be something of concern.”
Checks in areas that have been traditional habitats for pigeons such as beneath underpasses, the Fredericton grandstands, and harness racing horse barns all turned up empty for the birds.
Residents have noticed the flock missing from city streets and downtown roofs.
“I haven’t seen any pigeons” said Bruce Newman, a local painter and resident of Fredericton for the last 15 years.
“There are usually lots of pigeons downtown but I haven’t seen any. I think it’s pretty unnatural. Something could be going on, but I don’t know what.”
In the four hours CBC spent trying to locate any of the birds in the downtown only seven were spotted in total.
About Pigeon Patrol:
Pigeon Patrol Products & Services is the leading manufacturer and distributor of bird deterrent (control) products in Canada. Pigeon Patrol products have solved pest bird problems in industrial, commercial, and residential settings since 2000, by using safe and humane bird deterrents with only bird and animal friendly solutions. At Pigeon Patrol, we manufacture and offer a variety of bird deterrents, ranging from Ultra-flex Bird Spikes with UV protection, Bird Netting, 4-S Gel and the best Ultrasonic and audible sound devices on the market today.
Voted Best Canadian wholesaler for Bird Deterrent products four years in a row.
Police were called to the Strip District Friday morning after a clash between an animal rights activist and a man trapping pigeons.
Todd Glotfelty, who calls himself “the bird man of Elliott,” was trapping birds when he was confronted by a woman.
“She accused me of doing all kinds of evil stuff to pigeons. Pigeons are my life. I love pigeons,” said Glotfelty.
According to a police spokesperson, it is legal to trap birds in the city except in a city park.
Councilwoman Darlene Harris told Channel 11’s Rick Earle that she plans to introduce legislation that would ban bird trapping in the city limits.
“I have no idea what happened, but the lady in question got annoyed or very upset because she saw these gentlemen here are claiming to trap birds for wedding releases but they have feral gray pigeons in their van and she was upset,” said Rebecca Reid, a friend of the woman.
Glotfelty said he uses the birds for weddings.
The woman will not face charges related to the confrontation, but she was warned by police to stay away from Glotfelty.
About Pigeon Patrol:
Pigeon Patrol Products & Services is the leading manufacturer and distributor of bird deterrent (control) products in Canada. Pigeon Patrol products have solved pest bird problems in industrial, commercial, and residential settings since 2000, by using safe and humane bird deterrents with only bird and animal friendly solutions. At Pigeon Patrol, we manufacture and offer a variety of bird deterrents, ranging from Ultra-flex Bird Spikes with UV protection, Bird Netting, 4-S Gel and the best Ultrasonic and audible sound devices on the market today.
Voted Best Canadian wholesaler for Bird Deterrent products four years in a row.
Guards have captured a pigeon flying cocaine and cannabis into a prison in Costa Rica.
La Reforma prison guards in San Rafael de Alajuela, Costa Rica, captured the bird as it flew 14 grams of cocaine and 14 grams of cannabis into the facility stuffed into a pouch attached to its body.
Paul Bertozzi, director of the police, confirmed reports that at around 2pm on Wednesday jailers saw the pigeon flying of the walls and towards the centre of the prison.
A mugshot of the bird, caught by security officers and taken into custody, was released by Costa Rica’s Department of Justice and Peace as a warning to be vigilant for Narcopalomas.
Narcopalomas, loosely translated as ‘drugs doves’, have been used by prisoners and their accomplices in the past– similar birds have been caught in prisons in Colombia, Argentina and even Bosnia.
Mr Bertozzi said the pigeon was “nothing new” and that drug traffickers were using “unimaginable ways to achieve their macabre atrocities”.
“In the past (the traffickers) have used cats and dogs to pass drugs to prisoners. Now it seems they are using pigeons to carry in their wares from the outside,” he told Spanish news agency Efe.
The latest such example hardly surprised prison authorities though: iguanas, dogs and cats have been used in the past to smuggle illegal substances into the jail.
About Pigeon Patrol:
Pigeon Patrol Products & Services is the leading manufacturer and distributor of bird deterrent (control) products in Canada. Pigeon Patrol products have solved pest bird problems in industrial, commercial, and residential settings since 2000, by using safe and humane bird deterrents with only bird and animal friendly solutions. At Pigeon Patrol, we manufacture and offer a variety of bird deterrents, ranging from Ultra-flex Bird Spikes with UV protection, Bird Netting, 4-S Gel and the best Ultrasonic and audible sound devices on the market today.
Voted Best Canadian wholesaler for Bird Deterrent products four years in a row.
THERE’S A REASON Woody Allen once dubbed pigeons the rats of the sky. They’re filthy. They poop on everything, and that stuff can carry disease. And they pester you mercilessly, especially when you’re just trying to eat a sandwich. Everyone knows they’re gross.
Downtown Chicago, where I spend most of my time, has beggars on nearly every corner.
The downtown area of the city of Fredericton is missing thousands of feathered residents.
Police were called to the Strip District Friday morning after a clash between an animal rights activist and a man trapping pigeons.
Guards have captured a pigeon flying cocaine and cannabis into a prison in Costa Rica.