The politicians are seated in a semi-circle at a meeting of the council. One by one, they raise their voices as part of the deliberation. “I believe it is time we took a position on this,” says a black-blazered woman. “It’s not an industry that I want to support,” a second woman, wearing dark-rimmed glasses, reads into the official record.
“It’s time,” concludes the mayor, donning the heavy chain that is the insignia of his office, “to end the practice in our community.”
It is a fall meeting of the District of North Vancouver’s city council and they are discussing whether people should be allowed to keep pigeons. Councillors Lisa Muri, in the blazer, and Megan Curren, with the glasses, ultimately vote with the mayor in favour of an outright pigeon ban.
Coun. Matthew Bond, one of those who votes against, says skeptically, “I don’t necessarily see this as a good use of our time.” But the bylaw passes, four to two.
Something smells, though. Only one property in the community is known to harbour pet pigeons. Only one complaint about pigeons, dating back several years, is known to be active. Only one city councillor has recused herself from the discussion. “I have been in a situation like this,” Coun. Betty Forbes says, at the same meeting. “So I’m stepping aside.”
One plus one plus one equals . . . a conflict of interest?
Documents obtained by the CBC under access-to-information seem to bolster that view of events. The “situation” was that Forbes lived next-door to pigeons. That she did not like pigeons. And that after complaining to the city as a private citizen to no avail, she took matters into her own hands; after being elected to council in 2018, in an email to two fellow councillors, she requested a bylaw banning residents from keeping the birds.
Emails viewed by Maclean’s suggest that during the spring, Muri initiated a process to change the district’s pigeon ownership rules, and kept Forbes up to date on its progress. But the whole project has since run into trouble because it turns out Kulwant Dulay, Forbes’ neighbour, cares deeply about his pigeons. He cares enough to go to court.
His petition to B.C. Supreme Court, dated Dec. 4, seeks to have the bylaw declared illegal and set aside. It relies heavily on the CBC’s reporting, referencing emails between Forbes and Muri earlier this year that appear to reveal a plot to hatch the bylaw.
Dulay is arguing that Forbes’s involvement was “biased and bad faith and acting in a conflict of interest,” says Camille Chisholm, a lawyer representing the pigeon enthusiast. The district has retained its own lawyers and was expected to respond in January.
The same week as Dulay’s petition was filed, the District of North Vancouver announced it was tasking former B.C. privacy commissioner David Loukidelis with investigating how the pigeon ban came to be. His review, the district announced, will assess the “awareness” of conflict-of-interest rules by councillors. The process is expected to take a couple of months.
Dulay, Chisholm adds, has kept homing pigeons as pets for years—including during his time in India before he immigrated to Canada. “My neighbours in the front and back, everybody loves my pigeons,” says Dulay, adding that other than Forbes’s, he hasn’t had a complaint in 17 years. “Everybody comes to my house and looks at them. It looks cool, them flying around.” Some have names. One is called “Big Boss.” His favourite pigeon is blue and white. He said it always comes to his hand.
Dulay keeps his 15 birds in a coop that’s about as tall as the backyard fence and roomy enough for him to enter and move around. During the warmer months, he lets them out to fly around the neighbourhood, including over other people’s yards. He said they always return.
Lately, he has wondered whether Forbes has a problem with him, not his pigeons. He said she “never talks” to him, and notes that he has never complained about her two barking dogs, though he believes he might have reason to.
His across-the-street neighbour, meanwhile, has spoken in his support. “I’ve had opportunity to go over and see the coop,” Krista Page told council on Nov. 18. ”It is clean. There’s no foul smell. I’ve never met neighbours that keep a tidier driveway and home and everything.” Page noted there have been no complaints from the Dulays’ other next-door neighbour, adding: “I just feel that this is very much a misuse of power.”
Forbes declined an interview request from Maclean’s but insisted in an email that there is “another set of correct facts” to the story. “However, because the mayor has requested an inquiry of all council and himself,” the email added, “I am unable to make any comments at this time.”
Her only public response came at the end of the same meeting Krista Page attended. “If I have erred in any way,” she said, “I assure council and the community that it was done inadvertently and in good faith with my understanding, as a new councillor, of the conflict-of-interest rules.”
Muri echoed Forbes in an email to Maclean’s, saying: “We are currently reviewing the process of this bylaw, so it would be inappropriate for me to comment.” But a response to the petition later filed in court by her lawyers denies the councillor was aware of any interest Forbes could’ve had in a pigeon ban beyond one “in common with electors of the municipality generally.”
The submission argues that neither councillor stood to gain financially from the bylaw and doubles down on the councillors’ position that the ban is legitimate and serves to protect residents from current and future pigeon keepers who might “adversely impact them or their property.”
To some, this is more than a dispute between neighbours. Givo Hassko, who is on the board of the Vancouver Poultry & Fancy Pigeon Association, told council in November he believed this was a test case for corruption in Canadian politics writ large. “If there are no consequences to how council goes to change bylaws here locally or Canada-wide,” he said, “then anyone—anyone—would get a green light.”
Hassko set up a GoFundMe to help with Dulay’s legal fees. At the time of writing, it had raised $700. A single commenter named Wayne, who pitched in $55, offered this input: “It is important that pigeons are not homeless.”
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Alarm bells were sounding in the United Kingdom in October. Nope, it wasn’t another economic crisis, but a bout of the so-called “zombie pigeon” disease.#
Pigeons were making odd movements and behaving strangely. They were twisted their necks to unnatural angles, were unable to eat, wandered aimlessly around in circles… Something was happening.
Experts pointed towards the cause: paramyxovirus. The disease, while not fatal to humans, is lethal to aviary animals that contract it.
A number of pigeons had to be euthanised on the Channel island of Jersey. As of October there were no recorded cases of paramyxovirus on the British mainland.
The birds, in addition to the twisted neck, lost weight due to the physical impossibility of eating and walked in circles with clear neurological signs of the brain, as confirmed by the veterinary analyses.
Seagulls in the Snow by Ron Hill Two Gulls loving the snow in an Uckfield Garden !!!
What is paramyxovirus?
The British government last updated their disease guidance for paramyxovirus back in 2018. It states that the disease does not usually affect humans though does affect pigeons, as the images suggest.
Signs of paramyxovirus infection in pigeons may include:
nervous signs, including trembling wings and heads, and twisting of the neck
partial paralysis of wings and legs (birds may fall over on landing and be unable to feed)
They also became thin from not being able to eat and not being able to sit still while they produce green feces.
How can the disease spread?
The disease is spread by direct contact between pigeons and through:
pigeon transporters that have not been adequately cleaned and disinfected
drinking water in lofts and transporters
pigeon fanciers carrying infection on their clothes, hands and feet
JSPCA Animal Shelter told the Mirror that the illness has no treatment “and many birds die within a few days”.
“Any that do survive will continue to shed the virus and be a risk to other birds,” a spokesperson added. “At the JSPCA, affected birds are humanely euthanased.”
This disease cannot affect humans, but it can cause conjunctivitis in those who handle sick birds.
Pigeon Patrol Products & Services is the leading manufacturer and distributor or 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
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A raving lunatic beheaded two pigeons in Bryant Park, proclaimed he was a “vampire” — and guzzled their blood in front of a horrified crowd, witnesses told The Post.
“He was holding up the pigeons and drinking their blood, letting the blood drip down his shirt,” recalled shocked onlooker Dominic D.
“He did it twice,” the 32-year-old said. “He was covered in blood. He said he was a vampire. It was pretty disgusting.”
Witnesses told The Post that the man threw one of the dead bird heads and splattered blood all over the shirt of a person who was eating lunch. He then calmly waited for cops to arrive.
“He was very calm when the police came,” explained Clarissa Plair, a 26-year-old Theology student who spends a lot of time in Bryant Park and has seen the pigeon perp before.
“He’s always here, yelling at people on the street,” she said. “He was telling [police] he’s a vampire.”
Authorities took a man into custody about 15 minutes later and transported him to St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital for a pysch evaluation, according to officials.
Photos and video posted on Twitter showed the bloody aftermath, with several pigeons swooping in to mourn their fallen bird brethren.
While the man behind the fowl fatalities is known to sit in the Bryant Park fountain drinking beer, witnesses said he’s never gone after any of his feathered friends before.
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Homing pigeons may share the human capacity to build on the knowledge of others, improving their navigational efficiency over time, a new Oxford University study has found.
The ability to gather, pass on and improve on knowledge over generations is known as cumulative culture. Until now humans and, arguably some other primates, were the only species thought to be capable of it.
Takao Sasaki and Dora Biro, Research Associates in the Department of Zoology at Oxford University, conducted a study testing whether homing pigeons can gradually improve their flight paths, over time. They removed and replaced individuals in pairs of birds that were given a specific navigational task. Ten chains of birds were released from the same site and generational succession was simulated with the continuous replacement of birds familiar with the route with inexperienced birds who had never flown the course before. The idea was that these individuals could then pass their experience of the route down to the next pair generation, and also enable the collective intelligence of the group to continuously improve the route’s efficiency.
The findings, published in Nature Communications, suggest that over time, the student does indeed become the teacher. The pairs’ homing performance improved consistently over generations — they streamlined their route to be more direct. Later generation groups eventually outperformed individuals that flew solo or in groups that never changed membership. Homing routes were also found to be more similar in consecutive generations of the same chain of pigeon pairs than across them, showing cross-generational knowledge transfer, or a “culture” of homing routes.
Takao Sasaki, co-author and Research Fellow in the Department of Zoology said: ‘At one stage scientists thought that only humans had the cognitive capacity to accumulate knowledge as a society. Our study shows that pigeons share these abilities with humans, at least to the extent that they are capable of improving on a behavioural solution progressively over time. Nonetheless, we do not claim that they achieve this through the same processes.’
When people share and pass knowledge down through generations, our culture tends to become more complex over time, There are many good examples of this from manufacturing and engineering. By contrast, when the process occurs between homing pigeons, the end result is an increase in the efficiency, (in this case navigational), but not necessarily the complexity, of the behaviour.
Takao Sasaki added: ‘Although they have different processes, our findings demonstrate that pigeons can accumulate knowledge and progressively improve their performance, satisfying the criteria for cumulative culture. Our results further suggest that cumulative culture does not require sophisticated cognitive abilities as previously thought.’
This study shows that collective intelligence, which typically focuses on one-time performance, can emerge from accumulation of knowledge over time.
Dora Biro, co-author and Associate Professor of Animal Behaviour concludes: ‘One key novelty, we think, is that the gradual improvement we see is not due to new ‘ideas’ about how to improve the route being introduced by individual birds. Instead, the necessary innovations in each generation come from a form of collective intelligence that arises through pairs of birds having to solve the problem together — in other words through ‘two heads being better than one’.’
Moving forward, the team intend to build on the study by investigating if a similar style of knowledge sharing and accumulation occurs in other multi-generational species’ social groups. Many animal groups have to solve the same problems repeatedly in the natural world, and if they use feedback from past outcomes of these tasks or events, this has the potential to influence, and potentially improve, the decisions the groups make in the future.
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FERAL PIGEONS, WHICH LIVE ON every continent in the world except Antartica, are famously adaptable—They shack up all over, from San Francisco to London to Mumbai.
They are also in Calgary, where around 200 of them have made their home on the roof of the South Health Campus, a 269-bed hospital. This was an unwelcome development, since pigeons can carry disease, and they poop a lot.
The hospital’s efforts to get rid of them—including with noise, which worked at first, before the birds got used to it—haven’t been successful, so recently they chose to get a little more serious. They’ve hired three baby peregrine falcons, according to the CBC, as a future anti-pigeon patrol.
A falconer, John Campbell, plans to release the falcons from the building, where it is hoped they will hunt down the pigeons and “other small game,” the CBC reports.
“You could [use] anything that would scare them, that would go after them as prey,” Campbell said. “It doesn’t have to be falcons but the falcons work very well.”
It will be a little time before the falcons get to the hunting, as just one has fledged so far. In the meantime, though, they’re being fed dead pigeons to give them a taste for pigeon blood.
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Fancy a pigeon as a pet? They’re about to be legal again in the District of North Vancouver.
District council members voted 5-0 Monday night in favour of new bylaw governing domestic pigeons. It caps off a controversial two-year chapter for council, which originally voted to ban the pet birds in 2019.
Soon after, it came to light that Coun. Betty Forbes had lobbied Couns. Lisa Muri and Megan Curren behind the scenes to introduce the ban after years of complaints about her neighbour’s flock of pet pigeons.
In February 2020, former information and privacy commissioner David Loukidelis released his report into the matter following an independent review. Among other things, he recommended that council shore up their training in ethics and oversight.
Council rescinded the ban last fall and sought to replace it with a modernized version of the district’s original bylaw dating back to 1971. The new bylaw passed Monday night limits the number of backyard squabs to 20 and governs the minimum size and setbacks for their roosts. It also makes enforcement easier for bylaw staff.
Coun. Jordan Back, one of the two council members who opposed the prohibition bylaw, said he was glad to see things largely put back to the way they were.
“This has certainly been a long and very costly process – something that never should have been brought forward in the first place. We were never dealing with a community concern,” he said.
Despite the independent investigation and now abandoned lawsuits, Coun. Mathew Bond said he feels the community is still owed some accountability for the whole “frivolous” process.
“I think that leaving those issues unresolved over the long term is detrimental to the integrity of this council,” he said.
When council held a special meeting on the matter last week, only three members of the community spoke out: two who argued pigeons are a threat to public health and one who said she had no problem’s living next to her own neighbour’s flock.
Mayor Mike Little said his view that pet pigeons are better suited to more rural communities had not changed, but he also found the public health arguments “spurious at best.”
“I think it’s fair to say that this is a pragmatic solution to the problem at hand,” he said.
Similarly, Curren said she has the same perspective on animal rights now as she did when she voted in favour of the prohibition.
“But I am opposed to the process, and I advocated for this bylaw to be brought back to a public process in since Nov. of 2019,” she said, noting that council did “fall short” of the district’s code of ethics. “When we have an opportunity to listen and to learn and to do better, then we need to do that.”
Coun. Jim Hanson, who also originally voted in favour of the ban, said with only two or three known pigeon fanciers in the district, the issue wasn’t worth any more of council’s time.
“If the keeping of pigeons becomes a community issue justifying further involvement, no doubt we will hear about that,” he said.
Muri and Forbes both recused themselves from the discussion and vote.
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Voted Best Canadian wholesaler for Bird Deterrent products ten years in a row.
Contact us at 1 877-4-NO-BIRD,(604) 585-9279 or visit our website at www.pigeonpatrol.ca
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