Baerren: Normal people don’t accept pigeon droppings as a thing

by johnnymarin | Oct 23, 2017 | Pigeon Patrol's Services

You wouldn’t think it an unreasonable request: Please, good sirs, be a dear and clean up the pigeon droppings in front of your building. Not only are they unsightly, but they are also a public health nuisance.

Turns out that in this town, yes, there is resistance to cleaning up pigeon droppings. It’s a perfect metaphor for why all of Mount Pleasant looks neglected, run-down and flat-out decayed. We as a community have taken the American can-do attitude that put a man on the Moon and turned it into a contraction. It’s Mount Pleasant’s can’t-do spirit. Can’t stop businesses from closing, can’t stop storefronts from falling into disrepair, can’t even clean up bird crap from downtown sidewalks.

Some of these things represent forces beyond any control. No one in town can stop the migration of consumer activity to the Web, for instance. Rather than thinking that we’re going to fix things by using the same hammer to pound at the same nail, we have to adapt to today’s world rather than bemoan the loss of yesterday’s.

But, my god, the lack of energy and urgency devoted to fixing a community that simply looks haggard and used up … it’s like no one is even trying. Like, not bothering to clean up after pigeons.

It’s very basic stuff, folks. Like, so basic I’m surprised it has to be an issue. Like, so basic, that we as a community ought to let slide things like broken pavement, cigarette butt-filled planters and shaggy-looking marquee posters as a different conversation until the pigeon poo gets cleaned up.

It’s the unsightliness of it. It’s the public health risk. It’s about making a place look attractive to people hoping to relocate or make business investments here. It’s also about yelling at CMU students to stop treating the city like their personal toilets while actually allowing pigeons to literally do that.

At the start of the summer, if you’d have asked, I would have pointed to commercial vacancies as the biggest impediment to revitalizing this city. It’s even worse. If we as a community are incapable of getting bird poop cleaned up, it’s a sign that we need a total rebuild. Not an adjustment, not a modification. A total tear-down and rebuild from the foundation. Normal people don’t accept sidewalks covered in animal feces.

There are lots of people to point fingers at, if that’s your thing. The morning of this writing, someone who operates businesses downtown referred to a concerned private citizen as an idiot for complaining. An idiot, for complaining about pigeon poop caked to the sidewalks. Talk about misplaced priorities.

At the city, someone should have addressed this more aggressively so people didn’t have to take time out of their busy days to complain about it. We don’t need another ordinance or public hearings or months of talk and tabled motions to clean up pigeon poo. We need someone to go to building owners and say, “Clean this up, and clean this up now, or we’re going to cite you and if you don’t want to pay the fine you can explain to a judge why you are endangering public health.”

But, mostly it’s the attitude, the attitude that all of our problems are intractable, that we can’t address any of them because we lack the tools to take action. Not to engage in hyperbole, but we do remember who licked the Nazis and rebuilt Western Civilization 60 years ago? Cleaning up after birds seems like a pretty low bar by comparison.

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.

Contact Info: 1- 877– 4– NO-BIRD (www.pigeonpatrol.ca)

PIGEON PROJECT PICKS UP STEAM

by johnnymarin | Oct 22, 2017 | Pigeon Patrol's Services

Efforts to bring Glendive’s pigeon population under control are picking up steam with nearly 300 of the winged vermin trapped out of the downtown area in the past month and a half.

District Sanitarian Kevin Peña approached the city Finance, Utilities, Property and Recreation Committee on Wednesday to ask that the city go ahead and donate the $1,000 to the pigeon control effort which the city council had set aside for that very purpose a few months ago, which the committee ultimately recommended the full city council approve doing.

Peña explained that the “pigeon trapper” he worked out an agreement with some months back to undertake pigeon control, Brian Cleveland, has been unable to turn a profit off of trapping the birds as he thought he would be able to. Cleveland’s original plan had been to trap the birds and then sell them to buyers down in Florida, where the birds are considered a delicacy and sold in restaurants as “squab.”

“That didn’t prove to be as feasible as he had hoped, because basically the shipping turned out to be more than he thought it would be,” Peña said.

Peña told the FUPR Committee that with being unable to sell the pigeons he traps at a profit — and with Cleveland supplying the trapping supplies at his own cost — he felt it would be “fair and reasonable” to give Cleveland a $2 per pigeon bounty as he has now requested. Peña noted that the county has also pledged $1,000 to his office for pigeon control, adding that with the addition of the city’s contribution, he would have enough funds to pay Cleveland for trapping up to 1,000 birds.

“A thousand dollars from you and a thousand dollars from me is going to take care of a thousand birds,” Peña told the FUPR Committee. “And we can certainly reimburse the city with what we don’t spend or we can just roll it over.”

The only materials Peña has provided for the effort through his office so far is the trap itself. He noted that with that one trap, which has been sitting on top of the Jordan Inn since August, Cleveland has managed to trap out 268 pigeons — 204 in August and 64 so far this month.

In a phone interview Thursday, Cleveland said he estimates there’s “probably about 1,100 to 1,200 left after I’ve taken out almost 300,” adding that with continued trapping, he believes he can almost zero out Glendive’s pigeon population before the first snow flies.

“I have a feeling that by Halloween, this problem will be drastically reduced and we won’t see near the number of birds that we have now,” Cleveland said. “Probably one-half to three-quarters of the population will be gone before the first snow.”

Cleveland should know a thing or two of what he’s talking about, Peña pointed out. He ran his own wildlife trapping business out of Tampa, Fla., for 23 years, and professionally trapped pigeons and other wildlife all over that region, including working to trap pigeons out of Tampa’s Raymond James Stadium, home of the NFL’s Tampa Bay Buccaneers.

Peña isn’t the only one who has decided to rely on Cleveland’s expertise, either. Earlier this week, a new trap went up on top of the Dion Building. The building’s owner, Dr. Kevin McPherson, privately contracted with Cleveland to trap pigeons out from around his downtown property.

McPherson said that after taking ownership of the Dion Building, he talked to Peña and researched several different options for pigeon control and ultimately decided that contracting with Cleveland to trap them would be the best way to go about it.

“I’d looked into ways of dealing with pigeons on my own and I basically concluded the only humane and efficient way to do it was to trap them and get them out of there that way,” McPherson said.

McPherson said he is keen to rid his building of roosting pigeons not just because they are “a nuisance and a health concern,” but also because the birds’ acidic droppings can do a great deal of damage to the brick and stone work on the historic buildings themselves.

He added his hope that other downtown building and business owners might also get involved in the pigeon control effort, saying that getting rid of the pigeons — and their ubiquitous droppings — littering the building sides and sidewalks of downtown Glendive would be another important step in breathing new life into the downtown area and making it a more attractive place for people to visit, shop and eat.

“I guess my thoughts are that if people are going to come down to our downtown and shop in the stores and eat in the restaurants, they should be able to do so and expect that the sidewalks should be clean and they don’t have to watch out for what’s above them,” McPherson said. “I think (pigeon control) helps promote a cleaner community, a cleaner downtown and a more enjoyable (downtown) experience.”

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.

Contact Info: 1- 877– 4– NO-BIRD (www.pigeonpatrol.ca)