Traill is one of a half-dozen neighborhood activists whose volunteer campaign against these birds has escalated idiosyncratically for more than a year. Their leader, Laura Dodson, had ordered him out on yet another round of surveillance, to update the group’s hulking pigeon “dossier.” “We’re kind of an unusual neighborhood association,” Dodson told me.

Dodson has lived in Hollywood for 29 years. She likes pigeons and does not want them killed or made to suffer. She said this repeatedly in the clipped, mildly truculent way she says a lot of things. But having helped muscle gangs and drugs out of her neighborhood in the 80’s, Dodson says she feels besieged again. She and her group, the Argyle Civic Association, have turned to a series of unconventional approaches to neutralize a problem they simply refuse to put up with. “We’re in the middle of the biggest boom, and there are pigeons everywhere — like where they’re going to put the W hotel,” she says, invoking, as she often does, the upscale hotel as a symbol of Hollywood’s hard-won renaissance. “There’s nothing but pigeon poop.”

A pigeon dispenses about 25 pounds of excrement a year. Often this gunk must be blasted off hard-to-reach places using boom lifts and steam hoses. Pigeon-related damage in America has been estimated to cost $1.1 billion a year. But the full scope of our disdain and distrust for the birds is impossible to quantify; it’s hard even to explain. Marketing by the bird-control industry — a lucrative offshoot of the $6.7-billion-a-year pest-control business — reminds us that pigeons and their dung can spread more than 60 diseases. This is true, but not necessarily panic-inducing, given the exceedingly rare incidences of respiratory infections like cryptococcosis.

For much of the 20th century, controlling pigeons primarily meant killing them. (Culling remains a common fallback position; the United States Department of Agriculture kills 60,000 pigeons a year in response to complaints.) But even the trade journal Pest Control now warns that with “millions of bird lovers out there,” you must consider “the publicity you would receive if your local paper runs photos of hundreds of poisoned pigeons flopping around on Main Street.” As we have become less tolerant of the birds, we have also, somehow, grown more concerned about their well-being.

The bird-control industry has evolved to fill this paradoxical niche. Pigeon control has increasingly become about moving pigeons elsewhere. With a staggering catalog of spikes, nets, sticky gels, coiled-wire barriers, ultrasonic noisemakers, holographic frighteners, fake owls and even electrified strips — from Bird-Shock Flex-Track to Bird Jolt FlatTrack — bird controllers have been busily transforming our bare ledges into unwelcoming obstacle courses. Often, according to Bob Van Gelder, who for 25 years has been president of the full-service pigeon-proofing company Birds Away/Pigeons Away, you must “follow the problem” — destabilizing pigeons’ existing roosts and anticipating their next move. “Birds have instinct,” he says. “We have logic.”

Of course, these displaced pigeons inevitably turn up somewhere else. The Argyle Civic Association sought a more holistic, area-wide fix — as well as a humane one. So in May of this year, after consulting with People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, the group voted unanimously to implement a novel strategy pioneered by the Pigeon Control Advisory Service, or PiCAS, in Britain.

Essentially, the PiCAS model complements the widespread pigeon-proofing of buildings — this aimless shifting of pigeons from facade to facade — by situating large birdhouses, called dovecotes, in places like city parks. Displaced pigeons relocate inside. As the pigeons breed, volunteers and workers reach into the dovecotes and remove their eggs, replacing them with dummy eggs to stave off rebreeding. It’s a mechanical form of birth control that, PiCAS claims, can reduce total pigeon populations by half over four years.

As all kinds of wildlife rebound and infiltrate the cities from which we exiled them, PiCAS’s approach is among a number of humane and ecologically savvy efforts on the forefront of urban animal control. Elsewhere, the U.S.D.A. is working to orally vaccinate skunks and raccoons against rabies and to use chemical contraceptives to treat nuisance animals like deer, prairie dogs and Canada geese. As we learn to recognize each city as an ecosystem, we may be more willing to sustainably control these problematic populations as a wildlife manager might, rather than eradicating them or shooing them around as exterminators do.

Dovecotes have been erected in a handful of British towns, and when I first spoke to the director of PiCAS, Guy Merchant, in May, he told me that Melbourne, Australia, was finalizing an ambitious scheme in its financial district. Melbourne, Merchant said, agreed to take every recommendation in the 30-page report that he produced after an initial visit. (He offers free consulting outside Britain.) Since the number of pigeons is a function of the availability of food, Merchant ordered a public-relations campaign discouraging pigeon feeding and suggested the appointment of a municipal “pigeon warden” — a caseworker to persuade the most “deliberate and persistent” pigeon feeders to feed only around the dovecote. While in Melbourne, Merchant persuaded one elderly gentleman to do just this, once the dovecote was erected. Merchant deemed this “a major coup,” since the man, notorious for meting out about 90 pounds of seed every day, was probably supporting 3,000 pigeons all by himself.

But just as PiCAS’s dovecotes essentially domesticate pigeons, they also appear to bring these well-meaning pigeon lovers — often the lonely seniors we presume them to be — back into the fold as well. Around the dovecote, their eccentric hobbies is legitimized. “That feeder then becomes the Pied Piper of Hamelin,” Merchant told me. “He or she brings the pigeons with him. It’s one of those rare things in life — a win-win situation.”

I pictured an elegant, almost St. Francis-like pastoral. It wasn’t until I arrived in Hollywood that I began to wonder if this, or any harmonizing of avian instincts and human logic, could withstand one unfortunate fact: we have logic, but we do things every day to defy it.

The pigeons among us are feral — free-roaming descendants of once-domesticated birds. The pigeon was the first bird species domesticated by man, more than 5,000 years ago, in fact. Millions were raised across medieval England and France, either as messengers or meals, in dovecotes similar to the ones PiCAS employs. In the late 18th century, the French aristocracy’s pigeons, which were free to fly into the fields, were infuriating the peasantry, looting grain reserves and pecking at crops. The farmers weren’t permitted to kill them, and this incessant, aerial tyranny has been cited as one cause of the French Revolution. Once in power, the revolutionaries made a point of destroying the dovecotes, spilling the stocks into the wild — meaning that ever since, generations of these exiled nobles have fanned out to muck up the hoods of our cars.

Modern Americans have been similarly shortsighted. Pigeons were one of the few species left unprotected by the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918. They were often killed with shotguns. After World War II, poisons emerged as discrete alternatives. Many, like the Rid-a-Bird Perch, which poisoned pigeons through their feet, were phased out as the environmental movement grew. Avitrol, which is typically mixed with corn or other grain, is the last remaining poison in commercial use.

Killing pigeons doesn’t actually accomplish much, however. In 1961, Basel, Switzerland, began rapaciously culling its population of 20,000 pigeons. Its trappers and marksmen depleted some flocks by 80 percent, only to watch them return, sometimes in greater numbers, within weeks. This went on, like a demoralizing carnival game, for 25 years. The city finally stood down, having killed 100,000 pigeons. There were still 20,000 pigeons in Basel.

Then, in 1988, the biologist Daniel Haag-Wackernagel established 13 lofts (essentially, rooftop dovecotes) around Basel and began replacing eggs. Within four and a half years, Basel Pigeon Action, as he called his program, reduced the city’s pigeon population to 10,000. He has subsequently become one of the world’s few experts on feral pigeons. Guy Merchant, the director of PiCAS, claims to have devised his organization’s strategy before Haag-Wackernagel’s work began and stresses that the two are not affiliated. Nonetheless, when PiCAS claims that the dovecote scheme is “scientifically proven” to halve pigeon populations, it is citing Haag-Wackernagel’s peer-reviewed 1995 study, “Regulation of the Street Pigeon in Basel” — and, notably, his study alone.

The futility of killing pigeons is a far better established fact. An emptied niche in any ecosystem will rapidly be filled, either by immigrants or newborns. And pigeons are not only opportunistic, keeping a keen lay of the land, but also prolific breeders. This is partly our fault. Millennia of domestication selected for more fecund pigeons long before these natural cliff-dwellers settled into the architectural canyons of the modern city. As the value of food cheapened after World War II, pigeons urbanized along with us, no longer having to commute to forage in surrounding fields. The city, with its abundance of safe and sheltered breeding locations, now also offered an abundance of food. “Whenever you couple that,” says Louis Lefebvre, a biologist at McGill University who has studied pigeons in Montreal, “you’ll get an explosion.”

Moreover, when someone feeds pigeons in the park every day at noon, the birds are able to organize their day around that appointment. There, pecking 145 times a minute, a pigeon can rapidly eat its fill for the day, about one ounce. Cobbling that sustenance together from trash might require thousands of pecks at numerous locations, many of them far apart. Haag-Wackernagel speculates that the resulting free time and excess energy allows pigeons to breed more rapidly and successfully. Feral pigeons lay eggs six times a year, producing as many as 12 squabs in that time.

“In a city like New York or like Melbourne,” Merchant argues, “the pigeon population is sustained solely by little old ladies and little old men that go out every single day and feed top-quality foods to the birds.” This isn’t the average office worker, flinging the last crumbs of lunch. Like the man in Melbourne, these feeders maintain a purposeful regimen. Lefebvre calls them “marginal city dwellers whose interests in life do not extend beyond feeding pigeons.” He describes, with disarming empathy, people who “wait outside the backdoors of restaurants for day-old bread and patiently soften all the bread and break it into little pieces and then hand it out to the pigeons.”

Without much effort, I began finding stories of such feeders in Michigan, Washington, New York, California — all eerily similar, as if they were proprietors in the same franchise. In Marin County, one was distributing organic polenta with pine nuts. In San Francisco, I met a white-haired Scottish widow who not only fed pigeons but also retrieved dead ones off the streets, wrapped them in plastic and buried them in trash cans.

Attempts to fine feeders have proved unpopular. (Shortly after Merchant left Melbourne, a local paper criticized the city for threatening an 87-year-old woman with a fine of nearly $8,000.) Feeders tend to believe the pigeons depend on them. Thus, PETA, in a pamphlet promoting PiCAS, recommends that the public-relations campaign accompanying any dovecote plan should “focus on the fact that a reduction in available food will not result in starvation for large numbers of pigeons.” Though such events are impossible to predict exactly, basic ecology suggests that pigeons, forced to expend more energy foraging, will disperse and slow their breeding.

“At the end of the day, pigeons are there because we’re filthy, dirty creatures,” Merchant told me. “They’re there because we’re stupid creatures who go on feeding them.” They are the heroes of a great co-evolutionary success story. One ornithologist has crowned them “superdoves.” The less deferential way of saying this is, we’ve taken an otherwise unobjectionable bird and built the perfect pest.

As our car idled beside the CBS studios in Hollywood, Laura Dodson pointed at birdseed spilled across several feet of sidewalk. “You can tell by the red stuff on top, the reddish glow,” she said. “That means it was poured this morning.” The pigeons, Dodson has noticed, eat the red bits first.

Dodson and Jeffrey Traill, two of the Argyle Civic Association’s most indefatigable pigeon combatants, had picked me up just before 7 a.m. to tour what they referred to as “the affected area.” Here, a woman named Susie Kourinian — they called her Bird Lady — had been routinely emptying entire 25-pound bags of birdseed from the rear door of her black S.U.V. “She’s like a stealth bomber,” Traill said.

Traill drove us to a squalid traffic triangle near the Capitol Records Building — the first place they noticed Bird Lady’s regular feeding — and then to a subway stop near Hollywood and Vine, where, they said, they often found hundreds of birds on power lines in the morning, waiting for food and spattering parked cars. At our next stop, a grocery store, anti-roosting spikes lined every light post and tier of the facade. But in a corner of the parking lot, pigeons indifferently pecked at a mound of fresh seed.

Pigeon feeding is illegal in Los Angeles in only a precisely delineated section of downtown around Pershing Square; it has been illegal there, and nowhere else in the city, for as long as anyone can remember, and for no immediately apparent reason. Attempts by the City Council to reason with Bird Lady, including at least one visit by a staff member to Kourinian’s place of business, have failed, and the Argyle Civic Association initially began lobbying to expand the law. To document the extent of the problem, they devoted most of April to ramshackle reconnaissance. Dodson says that their patrols began as early as 3 in the morning. They kept detailed logs of all sightings and videotaped Bird Lady in action; in stills, she pours a robust stream of seed from her waist like a cement mixer. They compiled “witness statements” from neighbors who had quarreled with her. Dodson, for her part, avoided any skirmishes. “Once we started this investigation,” she said, “my mouth’s been shut.”

Gradually, they built up an almost ethnographic understanding of Bird Lady’s routine, mapping 13 “known locations” where she fed. One day, Dodson says, she followed Bird Lady behind the Ricardo Montalban Theater, retrieved 45 empty birdseed bags from the Dumpster, then fanned them across her patio for a neighbor to photograph. Based on this evidence, the group approximated Kourinian’s annual outlay at 112 tons of seed and, using a scholarly article on pigeon metabolism (someone found it online), estimated that she sustained about 6,700 birds. This intelligence was compiled in what Dodson, handing me my own cumbersome copy, called “Bird Book.”

Susie Kourinian, aka Bird Lady, would not be interviewed for this article. She is from Armenia and works as a seamstress. (She is pictured in the March 2005 issue of Vanity Fair, pinning up Cate Blanchett’s gown.) Kourinian told The L.A. Weekly that after feeding Hollywood’s pigeons for 10 years, she had begun sleeping in her shop, afraid that Dodson and company would follow her and find out where she lived. (In truth, they already knew.)

Other local news organizations picked up the story, and this publicity, coupled with the Argyle Civic Association’s unrelenting street presence, had, it seemed, begun intimidating Kourinian, upsetting her routine and forcing her to move elsewhere, just as spikes and shock-tracks displace the pigeons. Seed was still turning up on sidewalks by the time Dodson, Traill and I rumbled around Hollywood in late June, but no one had seen Kourinian’s S.U.V. for some time. The existence of multiple Bird Ladies now seemed almost certain. “I’ve wasted so much gas watching her, it’s ridiculous,” Traill told me. “I think she just felt uncomfortable with me watching her like a hawk.”

At the traffic triangle, we had found only a lone, purple-headed pigeon, drinking from a leaky water pipe near a jacaranda tree. Sitting in Dodson’s dining room after our outing, I mentioned that the situation looked to be under control or at least to be shifting elsewhere. “She’ll just be back if we take the pressure off,” she shot back. Besides, Dodson had begun to fear that if Bird Lady were forced to stop feeding pigeons altogether, they would be unable to find enough food on their own. “They’d fall out of the sky,” she said. Having already refused options like Avitrol and trapping, the Argyle group was sworn to humaneness. Changing the law to make pigeon feeding illegal throughout the city was no longer a priority.

The group’s PiCAS phase, too, turned out to be short-lived. Even before I first arrived in Los Angeles, Dodson had another conversation with her contact at PETA, a wildlife biologist named Stephanie Boyles. Boyles told her about a pigeon contraceptive-feed called OvoControl working its way through the E.P.A.’s approval process. Dodson’s rank and file was relieved: replacing eggs sounded like a lot of work. “It was a hands-on thing,” Dodson said, “and we didn’t want to do hands-on.” And so, a month after voting in favor of PiCAS, the Argyle Civic Association voted unanimously to scrap that plan and wait to put pigeons on the pill.

Chemical pigeon contraceptives were first experimented with 40 years ago. Efforts to dose a flock of free-roaming birds inevitably require overcoming several ecological and logistical obstacles. In this case, how do you ensure that each pigeon eats the required five grams of OvoControl every day, for many months? And if other protected bird species eat any OvoControl, how do you ensure that they won’t be harmed? Many biologists, including Haag-Wackernagel, argue that it has been difficult to even gauge the success of contraceptives in the wild, since treated and control flocks can’t be isolated meticulously enough to be counted.

OvoControl’s manufacturer, Innolytics, contends that these issues are being resolved; in fact, its active ingredient appears to have shown much real-world promise in several multiyear Italian studies. Most appealing to Dodson’s group, the company says that OvoControl can succeed in Hollywood regardless of whether feeders cooperate. Innolytics might even hijack Kourinian’s flocks — setting automatic rooftop feeders to dispense OvoControl 15 minutes before she arrives in a given spot, reaching the pigeons with their small, contraceptive “snack” before she satiates them. Boyles, for one, says that if a program does eventually go forward, Kourinian could be persuaded to feed pigeons OvoControl instead of seed. “We can channel that energy, that desire she has to be productive,” Boyles told me cheerfully.

Guy Merchant was not as sanguine when I called to fill him in. He said he distrusted all chemical contraceptives and seemed incensed that Boyles had suggested it. “Stephanie Boyles and the staff of PETA haven’t a clue where PiCAS is coming from,” he said. He had just had a similar falling out with Melbourne, severing all ties after accusing the city of being “unprofessional” and willfully ignoring his instructions. (A Melbourne spokeswoman says, “He seemed upset about something, but we can’t figure out exactly what.”) OvoControl looks like an easy fix, Merchant said, but in his experience: “All of the good ideas don’t work. All of the things that would be great if they were true, aren’t.”

Pigeons, he seemed convinced, will frustrate whatever elaborate technologies we mobilize to suppress them. But PiCAS seemed to me to rely, every step of the way, on the perfunctory compliance of people. It is difficult to judge which, finally, is more exasperating.

In his paper “Regulation of the Street Pigeon in Basel,” Daniel Haag-Wackernagel writes that as the city’s 20,000 otherwise intractable birds were reduced to 10,000 by his methods, the flocks inside the lofts also decreased by half — from 1,400 pigeons to 708. Immediately after reading this, I was confused: if he had been removing the eggs of only 1,400 pigeons, what accounted for the depletion of the other 18,600 birds in Basel?

“This is the giant misunderstanding,” Haag-Wackernagel told me in his thick Swiss-German accent when I reached him at home. I had missed the point of his paper altogether. This amused him. Apparently it happens a lot.

The dovecotes were irrelevant, he said. The Basel Pigeon Action worked exclusively via “a change of public opinions” — a euphemism, it seemed, for an almost belligerent offensive against pigeon feeders. Just as PiCAS advises, Haag-Wackernagel flooded Basel with posters and advertisements characterizing pigeon feeding as “cruelty to animals” since it leads to overpopulation and overcrowding. For emphasis, he included noxious photos of squabs infected with parasites.

Citizens began ratting out feeders, sending Haag-Wackernagel names and the locations where they were regularly found. People began accosting feeders on the street, shaming them. “Although we certainly did not condone extreme action,” he writes, “in one case a pigeon feeder was even physically attacked.” One elderly man, perhaps finding no safe place left to feed pigeons outside, began luring them in through his apartment window. He was evicted.

The Basel Pigeon Action emerges as a case study in logic — purely ecological logic — taken to its extreme. Basel so thoroughly conceived of the city as an ecosystem that it treated humans like animals. And as feeders stopped flooding the system with food, Basel’s pigeon population waned. Of course, Basel’s game wardens were also offing thousands of pigeons to speed along this otherwise gradual process.

The lofts, he said, were showpieces — a ploy. By maintaining a few healthy flocks at the city’s expense, Haag-Wackernagel said he hoped that even the most steadfast “pigeon friends” would be convinced that Basel cared about pigeons and would trust him enough to stop feeding. Initially, feeders were allowed to feed these resident pigeons in designated areas, but Haag-Wackernagel said he quickly came to believe that “the idea of feeding only in certain places will never work.” Other pigeons swooped in, ate and flapped off to breed elsewhere.

Haag-Wackernagel told me he didn’t know much about PiCAS but had followed an unaffiliated consortium of cities employing dovecote schemes in Germany. These programs also cite his paper, he said, but he doubted that they are successful. He argued that they have misread his paper in precisely the way I had, or at least optimistically misappropriated it.

“If we could start again,” he told me, “if I was ordered to solve the pigeon problem in New York City for example, I wouldn’t use the pigeon lofts at all.” Not wanting to go back on Haag-Wackernagel’s word or evict the birds he raised there, Basel is still strapped with tending to them every week. In hindsight, Haag-Wackernagel says that any feeders reasonable enough to appreciate the gesture would probably have been reached by the logical appeals of the P.R. campaign alone.

“Most of the pigeon feeders are in some way crazy,” he said, summarizing, rather informally, a psychological study he helped write on the subject. “It is impossible to influence these people.” The most relentless have no family and few interpersonal relationships. They adopt pigeons as surrogate children. He described women — older women — who worked as phone-sex operators and prostitutes to pay for birdseed. This may be the pigeon’s greatest co-evolutionary triumph: the black magic whereby these grubbing little birds have sought out their depredated, human counterparts and transformed them into senseless disciples.

“They are like martyrs,” Haag-Wackernagel said. Ultimately, he conceded, his Basel Pigeon Action succeeded because, during those four years, “many pigeon feeders died.” They were old, and with the city so thoroughly re-educated, no younger people filled their emptied niche. There is a certain ecological elegance to this idea, too.

The great Pershing Square Pigeon War began in Los Angeles in February 1923. “I am a bird lover,” declared Milbank Johnson of the Pacific Mutual Life Insurance Company. “But as the city has grown from a village to a great metropolitan city,” he continued, rarefied businesses like his couldn’t keep scouring droppings from their facades and dislodging pigeon carcasses from their gutters. Pershing Square’s brand-new Biltmore Hotel — the largest hotel west of Chicago — was budgeting $500 a month for such drudgery.

Legislators banned pigeon feeding in Pershing Square park, writing the law that Dodson once hoped to universalize. But even the mayor scoffed at outlawing this “perfectly natural and harmless act,” arguing that it wouldn’t solve anything. “Every day,” a reporter wrote in The Los Angeles Times, “the city became more and more ridiculous to be thus thwarted by a lot of pigeons.” Finally, the city called in a “noted pigeon trapper of the High Sierras” to transfer the birds to the outlying hills near where, that very summer, tremendous white letters were being raised to spell “Hollywoodland.”

As cities like Los Angeles continued to sprawl, and hinterlands like “Hollywoodland” grew into hubs like Hollywood, countless animal species have been driven farther and farther out. We are now perhaps more starkly estranged from wildlife than any other humans in history, and we have come to mistake those animals’ absence from our daily lives as the natural order — an entitlement, even. Pigeons not only weathered that upheaval; they also managed to thrive in it. They are the holdouts, the spoilers. We resent them for this, and we want them to go away. Our finickiness is their last, great predator.

Scientists in the relatively new field of urban wildlife biology often talk about a species’ “cultural carrying capacity.” This is to say that, along with the amount of food and habitat available, many animals live and die by just how willing we are to put up with them. But the idea of cultural carrying capacity encompasses another equally un-Darwinian force that interferes with nature’s mechanisms: our compassion.

It’s our queasiness about harming pigeons that gave rise to the bird-control industry’s spikes, nets and shock-tracks — the shuffling of pigeons from one paying customer to the next. Our compassion for our own species, meanwhile, generally keeps us from tormenting those who, for whatever pitiable reasons, compulsively feed the pigeons — and who are, by feeding, extending what they can’t help seeing as the most basic form of compassion. Ultimately, it’s this niche that pigeons exploit: the rift opened between these virtuous ideals. We all mean well, and it’s easy to get tripped up in that same vertiginous territory while searching for a resolution.

A few days after I left Hollywood, Laura Dodson spotted Bird Lady’s truck and — feeling, spontaneously, that the time was right for reconciliation — pulled over. Kourinian told Dodson that she was catching a plane. Things in Hollywood had become miserable for her. She was going to Armenia for a few weeks, to think and be with family. “I said, ‘If you’re going to Armenia, what are you going to do about your birds?”’ Dodson told me, relaying all this. “She said, ‘I’m walking away from my birds, and I don’t care.”’

Dodson said she felt terrible. She tried to apologize. “I actually cried with her,” she said. The Hollywood Pigeon Action had, albeit unwittingly, attacked the problem at its human source. From a certain vantage point, this may have been its payoff. All Dodson had to do was patiently wait on OvoControl’s E.P.A. approval. And she has. But after devoting so much time to rustling up humane solutions, she was, above all else, concerned about the fate of the birds. She appealed to Kourinian again. But, Dodson explained, “she said: ‘I don’t care. My life is all broken up.”’

Dodson knew what she had to do. She conferred with Stephanie Boyles at PETA. Given the extent of Kourinian’s feeding, Boyles hesitantly agreed, advising Dodson “to err on the side of compassion.” And so Dodson called Jeffrey Traill. Together, they drove to a Wal-Mart some distance away. They bought a modest two-week supply, about 20 or 30 bags.

“We got the seed,” Dodson told me. “We started putting it out.”

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.

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The District of North Vancouver is now investigating council after it passed a bylaw targeting a councillor’s neighbour and pet pigeons.

A new pigeon prohibition in a North Vancouver community has roused suspicions that a councillor’s continued grudge against the birds has led to a serious conflict of interest.

Thursday, in response to concerns from the public, district Mayor Mike Little ordered an independent investigation into the events leading up to and the passage the controversial ban known as the “Pigeon Prohibition Bylaw.” It bans residents from harbouring what some consider intelligent animals (who mate for life!), and others believe are rats with wings.

The chief administrative officer will look into the conduct of all councillors, including Little.

The pigeon squabble started almost three years ago, when Kulwant Dulay and his multi-generational family moved to the north shore neighbourhood and transformed a dilapidated backyard chicken coop into a charming miniature cottage for his homing pigeons.

“I fixed it up. I wash the coop every week. I keep it clean. There’s no smells at all,” Dulay told councillors Nov. 18. He and his family wash the pigeons and clean up their droppings.

His neighbour, councillor Betty Forbes, saw the situation differently. She declined to comment, as the independent review is being conduct and therefore would not be “appropriate.”

In emails to staff, released through a freedom of information request and first provided to CBC News, Forbes complained of her neighbour’s pigeons flying over her house and landing on her roof, and requested staff review a bylaw from 1971 to “control” the look of the coups, and limit the number allowed.

“Both chickens and pigeons can carry disease and are dirty,” Forbes wrote to staff in May 2017, before she was councillor. “How can you control health risks, monitor that the chickens or pigeons are being kept in approved coups, under humane living conditions, food is stored so as not to attract other animals, the number of kept birds is within the by-law?”

Forbes was elected Oct. 20, 2018. Five days later she requested staff act on her “pigeon complaint.”

“I have been patient but I feel that 1.5 years of asking for this issue to be dealt with in accordance with the bylaw is long enough,” Forbes said in her email.

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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.

Contact us at 1- 877– 4– NO-BIRD, (604) 585-9279 or visit our website at www.pigeonpatrol.ca

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Revealed: the mechanism that allows birds of a feather to flock together

Pigeons loaded with GPS backpacks show the secrets of co-ordinated flight control

Anyone interested in the democratic process could do worse than study the group decisions made by pigeons in mid-flight. Scientists have discovered that pigeon flocks are governed by a kind of “democratic hierarchy” that makes sure everyone flies in the same direction.

With the help of tiny GPS backpacks carried by each member of a loft of pigeons, researchers have discovered how large numbers of animals are able to instantly co-ordinate their movements to ensure that they do things as a group rather than as anarchic individuals.

Although the principle has so far only been demonstrated with a smallish flock of Hungarian pigeons, the scientists believe it could also operate on much bigger groups of animals, such as schools of fish and herds of wild buffalo, and might even explain how close-knit groups of people, such as juries, manage to reach a single decision.

“Anyone who has seen flocks of birds or schools of fish is familiar with this phenomenon of large numbers of individuals in a fast-moving group appearing to move in a co-ordinated way, and it’s not immediately clear how they coordinate themselves,” said Dora Biro, a zoologist at Oxford University.

“Our question was, how do groups like flocks of pigeons make decisions about what to do and where to go?” Dr Biro said.

The GPS backpacks carried by the pigeons enabled the scientists to precisely monitor the birds’ movements, relative to each other, every 0.2 seconds of their journey from the point where the scientists released them to their home loft in Budapest, 15km away.

“Previously, people had assumed democratic decisions, where every bird’s preferences are somehow averaged out, and that’s what the group ends up doing. Or there might be a single leader or a small number of leaders that everyone follows,” Dr Biro said.

“But what we were able to do by tracking these birds with individual GPS units was to resolve the leader-follower relationship within the flock. What we found was a more sophisticated and refined mechanism for how the decisions are made,” she said.

“There wasn’t a single leader, nor was there a kind of egalitarian decision-making where everyone had an equal vote. Instead, each bird did have a vote, but the weight that each vote carried differed between birds.

“It represented a kind of hierarchy where the decisions of some birds near the top of the hierarchy carried more weight in terms of what the birds did than the birds lower down the hierarchy, who were still influential but to a lesser degree,” said Dr Biro, who carried out the study with Tamás Vicsek of Eötvös University in Budapest.

“Whether such effects come from some individuals being more motivated to lead, or being inherently better navigators perhaps with greater navigational knowledge, is an intriguing question we don’t yet have an answer to,” Dr Biro said.

The loft of pigeons in the study consisted of 10 birds whose every movement was recorded as they flew in a flock from one location to another. The analysis, published in the journal Nature, described how each bird moved in relation to its neighbours, with some individuals leading more than others.

“It’s neither a completely democratic system, where everybody gets the vote, nor [one with] a single leader or a few leaders responsible for the decisions. But in fact every individual gets a kind of input into what the group as a whole should do,” Dr Biro said.

“If this was honed by evolution, if there was a selective advantage for individuals in the group to make decisions in this way, then it might represent a particularly efficient form of group decision making… It is possible that the mechanism we saw in these pigeons generalises to other species and to other group decision-making contexts, even in humans,” Dr Biro said.

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Contact us at 1- 877– 4– NO-BIRD, (604) 585-9279 or visit our website at www.pigeonpatrol.ca

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BioMed Central

A sampling of pigeons captured on the streets of Madrid has revealed the bacterial pathogens they carry. Researchers found two bugs that were highly prevalent in the bird population, Chlamydophila psittaci and Campylobacter jejuni, both of which cause illness in humans.

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Fernando Esperón from the Animal Health Research Center, Madrid, Spain, worked with a team of researchers to analyse blood and enema samples taken from 118 pigeons caught using gun-propelled nets.

He said, “the present study demonstrates the extremely high prevalence of two zoonotic pathogens in feral pigeons in Madrid. At the same time, infection with these pathogens did not appear to be associated with any harmful clinical signs in the birds themselves. This leads to the hypothesis that pigeons act as asymptomatic reservoirs of Chlamydophila psittaci and Campylobacter jejuni. These birds may therefore pose a public health risk to the human population.”

Chlamydophila psittaci was found in 52.6% of the pigeons captured, while Campylobacter jejuni was present in 69.1%. Although there have been few reports of disease transmission between pigeons and humans, it can occur by aerosols, direct contact or indirect contact through food and water contamination.

According to Esperón, “Thermophilic Campylobacter species are considered the primary pathogens responsible for acute diarrhea in the world. In fact, in many countries such as England and Wales, Canada, Australia and New Zealand Campylobacter jejuni infection causes more cases of acute diarrhea than infection by Salmonella species.”

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.

Contact us at 1- 877– 4– NO-BIRD, (604) 585-9279 or visit our website at www.pigeonpatrol.ca

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CTA’s Kiss ‘n Ride parking garage at the Cumberland Blue Line station is covered in pigeon droppings. The CTA has ordered the company that runs the garage to clean it up and install devices to keep pigeons away. (Credit: CBS)

CHICAGO (CBS) — The CTA has ordered the company that runs the “Kiss n’ Ride” parking garage at the Cumberland Blue Line stop to clean the place up. The place is overrun by pigeons and some fear it may become a health hazard.

CBS2’s Mike Parker reports, pigeons are everywhere at the parking garage for the Cumberland stop – lurking on every floor of the huge garage. They’re birds of a feather, all right, and wreaking havoc with some pretty fancy car exteriors.

“There are pigeon droppings, and I wouldn’t be surprised if there were bats up there as well,” said garage user Mark Gelula.

CBS 2 found no bats at the garage, only pigeons and mounds of droppings all over – some of them two to three inches deep.

Professional bird chaser Joe Seid toured the garage and said, “Maybe it’s cleaned occasionally, but it appears it’s not cleaned very frequently.”

Seid said he’s concerned about the health danger, not the paint jobs of the cars.

“If the droppings get airborne and you breathe it in, it could take a long time to take effect but it can be deadly,” he said.

Late Tuesday, after CBS 2 called to report what we found, the CTA ordered Central Parking Services to take action.

The company, which manages and maintains the garage was told to install measures designed to prevent roosting. The transit agency also ordered that the “area be thoroughly cleaned”, and that “efforts will be monitored and evaluated for effectiveness.”

According to the CTA, “the safety, security and well being of our customers and employees” is a top priority. Looks like a job for the experts!

Original by CBS 2 Producer Ed Marshall.

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Phil Mailloux fires a noise maker in the air at the Windsor Airport in Windsor on Friday, September 21, 2012. Mailoux is part of the team that keeps the airport free of potentially deadly pests. (TYLER BROWNBRIDGE / The Windsor Star)

To discover a vast varmint-free oasis in this city, go no further than the Windsor International Airport. It’s legal to hunt, trap, chase, haze and harass any bird or animal that shows its unwanted face within YQG’s 2,000 acres of fenced-off territory.

Trap cages containing pigeons as live lures are just one of the devices deployed to keep down the numbers of raptors, including American kestrels, red-tailed and Cooper’s hawks, snowy and great-horned owls and even peregrine falcons. Such birds are kept in cages for 24 hours and then transported elsewhere, including Holiday Beach.

Chicken wire edging and even glued-on golf tees keep birds off landing lights and other runway fixtures. Airfield directional signs are now encased in gravel piles to keep skunks from digging down and creating nesting burrows.

“We use the biology of the critter to let them know this is not a safe place to be,” said Roberts. Wildlife control trucks that can be quickly deployed come equipped with noise-making sirens and distress callers, and staff have firearms and an array of “pyrotech” devices at the ready, including bangers and screamers and screeching “wizards.”

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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 eight years in a row.

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Pigeons are helping researchers gather data on climate change. (University of Birmingham/Cover Images)

Pigeons have become the latest recruits in helping researchers gather data on climate change.

Scientists at the University of Birmingham have developed a tiny set of sensors resembling a small backpack that can be strapped onto the back of homing pigeons. These little sensors help researchers collect data on urban microclimates, including fluctuations in temperature, humidity, and winds that can have major effects on living in major cities.

The pigeons themselves come from local volunteers that raise them and who agree to work with the scientists. Pigeons are helping researchers gather data on climate change.

Known for their abilities to return to their nest, homing pigeons have been used as far back as Ghengis Khan to carry messages across long distances. Using homing pigeons means that the researchers are sure to get their instruments back and can download the information before sending the birds on their way to collect more data.

The design of the backpack conceived to keep the safety and comfort of the birds in mind. Each weighs less than 3% of the pigeon’s body weight, which is the standard for bird tracking devices. Sensors in the backpacks help researchers collect data on urban microclimates (University of Birmingham/Cover Images)

‘If [the pigeon owners] are not happy with any aspect of putting the sensors on their back, then they don’t have to fly their birds,’ explains Rick Thomas, the research fellow who leads the study. The welfare of the birds is utterly paramount and, they’re not likely to cause the same issues as drones, explained Thomas.

The pigeons all come from local volunteer groups.

Drones are not allowed to fly freely in any area, particularly after the trouble a drone caused at Gatwick airport in December. What’s more, drone technology would not be as cost effective as what’s possible with the pigeons.

Thus far, the group’s band of pigeons have logged over 620 miles with their backpacks over the course of 41 flights. Impressive!

Read more: https://metro.co.uk/2019/03/25/scientists-recruited-pigeons-help-stop-climate-change-9008203

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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 eight years in a row.

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Jayabaya

A pigeon named Jayabaya has become the most expensive bird ever sold in Indonesia. A racing pigeon in Indonesia has been sold for 1 billion rupiah ($101,700), breaking the national record for the most expensive bird ever sold in the country.

The male pigeon, named Jayabaya, was bought by Robby Eka Wijaya in the town of Cilodong in West Java to compete in Indonesia’s booming pigeon races.

Mr Wijaya bought the pigeon from his colleague after watching it compete in a number of different competitions.

He told the ABC he made an offer the owner could not refuse because the pigeon had “special features”, including a rare consistency and “stable mood”.

“One race can last over two days and nine rounds. Often birds can only perform for four rounds, but this bird is able to get into the top 20 at every competition,” he said.

Jayabaya competed against thousands of birds from across the country last year and received the highest score in the national competition, according to Mr Wijaya.

Pigeon racing is a traditional sport in Indonesia, mainly from the island of Java, but it has rapidly gained popularity ever since the creation of a national pigeon organisation.

Robby Eka Wijaya holds a sign of the pigeon he had just purchased named Jayabaya. The type of competition varies and includes speed racing, freestyle flying, as well as a table category, where the pigeons are expected to land back on a table at a certain time after flying.

In order to get Jayabaya to return during a competition, its owner calls out for him with his “girlfriend”, a female pigeon which shares the same cage as him, which Mr Wijaya says is a common practice.

“From what I’ve observed in the past 10 years, there are only two or three birds that are like him,” he said, adding that his friends has questioned his sanity over the amount he paid.

The popularity of pigeon racing in Indonesia has been partly attributed to high profit margins. Pigeons cost around 20,000 rupiah ($2) and the winnings can range from $7,500 to $10,000, or even a brand new car.

The registration cost to compete is also relatively low at a mere $13 to $16, according to the organisation of High Pigeon Fans Indonesia (PMTI).

However, Indonesian newspaper Kompas reports that the average participant pigeon racing competitions are anywhere between 1,500 to 2,000 people, making reaching the top 20 a feat in itself.

Mr Wijaya said it would be “easy” to be able to generate profit off Jayabaya, who is estimated to be two to three years old.

“There is already someone who is willing to spend 100 million rupiah ($10,200) for a set of eggs he fathers, but I won’t sell it,” he said.

In March this year, a Chinese buyer bought a racing pigeon for 1.252 million Euros ($1.98 million) during a pigeon auction by a Belgian breeder, the most expensive pigeon of all time.

The pigeon, named Armando, was described as the Lewis Hamilton of racing pigeons and holds a variety of records including best one day long distance pigeon in Belgium.

Have a Pigeon Problem?

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 eight 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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WIMBLEDON, England — Imagine the fluttering kerfuffle.

Roger Federer is serving for the Wimbledon title. He tosses the ball and cranes his neck.

Plop. A gift from a pigeon, right on the forehead.

Luckily, something like that hasn’t happened. At least not yet, not during a big match in recent memory.

For that, Wimbledon can thank a brown and chestnut bird of prey with keen eyes, a four-foot wingspan and bone-crushing talons. His name is Rufus the Hawk, and he plays a crucial role at the world’s oldest tennis tournament.

Every day, in the early morning, well before the matches begin, Rufus soars the skies over the All England Club, on the prowl for pigeons.

Without him, Wimbledon just might descend into aviary chaos. Pigeons could reign supreme, not just in the air, but also in the rafters, on the rooftops and across the grass courts.

The place is perfect for pigeons. “All of the grass seeds, all of the nooks and crannies, and the food waste from the fans,” Wayne Davis, one of Rufus’s handlers, said. Without Rufus, he reckoned, pigeons would number in the hundreds.

Wayne Davis, one of Rufus’s handlers, with a younger companion of the hawk. “Feral pigeons breed year round,” he said. “If you have just one pair breeding in the rafters at Centre Court, you would end up by the end of the year with about 40 more birds. You could have Roger Federer serving and clouds of pigeons wafting about.

“And pigeon poop, too, of course.”

Flocks of pigeons became a growing problem in the late 1990s, a threat to the prim fastidiousness that Wimbledon prizes above all. That was when the All England Club telephoned Davis and his family-run Avian Environmental Consult­ants.

Another of their birds was the first to patrol Wimbledon. Then Rufus the Hawk took over. He has become an English icon.

From dawn to dusk, he soars, on the prowl for pigeons. He doesn’t kill them. He toys with them, barreling from above, twisting, turning, squawking and nipping at their wings, announcing to all that the skies over Wimbledon belong to him.

“The pigeons learned he was in charge,” Davis said. “Other than a few stragglers, they stopped coming around like they did before. He scares them away.”

Rufus would have been a fearsome predator in the wild. Although he weighs just 1 pound 6 ounces, he cuts a much larger figure with his confident bearing and cascade of feathers.

He can spread his talons almost as wide as a person’s hand, and he can see 10 times better than any human. He can focus on a pigeon from a mile way.

Davis and his daughter, Imogen, feed him by hand because his weight is important. At less than a pound and a half, he can become too hungry and might have a pigeon for lunch. Maybe in front of the royal box.

They have taught him to come when they whistle.

Most often, he does.

Rufus soars and (almost) always comes back.

On one occasion three years ago, however, Imogen Davis had to chase him down at a nearby golf course. He took off again, across a road, then out of sight. She followed the jingle of his small bronze bell, attached to a talon.

She found him in the middle of a pond, standing in a thicket of weeds, hovering over a freshly killed duck. She couldn’t let him eat it. A full tummy would mean he wouldn’t come home until he was hungry again.

She waded through muck and lily pads, then through waist-high water. When she trooped back to Wimbledon, past crowds lined up to watch tennis in their finery, she had Rufus in her clutches.

One time, he vanished overnight.

Wayne Davis had left the bird in the family camper, parked outside an apartment they stay at during tournaments. Davis tucked him into the black cage that is his bedroom, and cracked a camper window just enough for ventilation. In the morning, Rufus and his cage were gone.

Someone had broken in and stolen him.

“My heart sank,” Imogen Davis said. She, her parents and her siblings had bought Rufus from a breeder when he was 16 weeks old, and he had become a member of the family.

“It was terrible,” she said. “There were a lot of tears.”

By then, Rufus had celebrity status, even a Twitter handle. The theft of Rufus the Hawk became headline news.

“Game, set and snatched,” wrote The Daily Mail.

The police said to expect someone to be in touch, demanding a ransom.

Three days went by. Then, from a phone booth, someone telephoned the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. No one knows for sure what had transpired — maybe Rufus had gotten away from the birdnappers, or maybe they decided to simply give him up — but he had been spotted in a park.

Imogen Davis, another handler, said Rufus once stayed in the Centre Court rafters overnight. The animal welfare charity picked him up. Rufus went back to work. He hasn’t missed a day since.

Imogen Davis said Rufus has taught her important lessons. Like the morning he flew into the Centre Court rafters and decided to stay there.

Two hours passed. Then five. Then 10. He still wouldn’t budge. “Luckily it wasn’t during the actual tournament,” she said, a nod to the fact that Rufus polices Wimbledon year round. She and her mother, Donna, wrapped themselves in towels and spent the night on Centre Court.

“We didn’t sleep in the royal box,” Imogen Davis said. “We didn’t sleep at all.”

The next day, Rufus came down.

The lesson was a lot like Zen: Rufus never gets ruffled. He does things in his own good time.

Has he ever, in his own good time, decided to perch in the Center Court rafters during a match?

No, Davis said. She chuckled. “But if he did, he would just stay perched up there, saying, ‘I don’t know who Roger Federer is.’”

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Pigeon droppings on the Blue Line

Pigeon droppings coating the sidewalks outside a Blue Line stop have proved to be more than just a nasty nuisance. The problem also led to a bunch of finger pointing to figure out a long-term solution.

The sidewalk outside the Irving Park Blue Line stop is coated in bird waste. CBS 2 Morning Insider Lauren Victory got some odd answers when she started asking questions about how to do more than just clean up the mess, but stop it from coming back.

“This Blue Line stop is affectionately known as the pigeon poop stop,” Derek Barthel said.

The nickname for his commute might sound comical, but Barthel has literal bones to pick with the birds that created the mess, which isn’t just limited to bird poop.

“You’ll see feathers, you’ll see bones, you’ll see pigeon bodies, you’ll see cracked eggs,” he said.

Beady eyes watch your moves like Mona Lisa; the cement below painted with pigeon excrement.

“It stinks to high heaven around here,” Barthel said.

The pigeons at the Irving Park underpass below the Kennedy Expressway drop waste right and left, forcing bus and train riders into a game of hopscotch.

Barthel said he’s even had some close calls “with getting hit in the face with a pigeon.”

“it’s not funny at all when you’ve got pets at home, and you’ve got to keep your shoes away from them, because they’ll lick them and get sick,” Barthel said. “It’s a public health issue. There’s pregnant women, there’s elderly, there’s sick, there’s children walking through day in and day out.”

That’s why Barthel wants more than just a clean-up.

“The problem first of all needs to be solved in the long-term,” he said.

Some have tried by installing bird spikes to keep the pigeons away from the underpass, but their solutions are in disrepair, as many of the strips have fallen off.

Perhaps jurisdiction complicates matters. The pigeons are hanging out on property half of which belongs to the CTA, the other half to the Illinois Department of Transportation.

Hosing off the sidewalk falls to the Chicago Department of Streets and Sanitation, but cleaning the sidewalks won’t get rid of the pigeons making the mess. Not to mention, the south side of the underpass is in the 45th Ward, and the north side is in the 39th Ward.

“I’ve been on the phone with them (the 39th Ward) no fewer than three times,” Barthel said.

When CBS 2 reached out to 39th Ward Alderman Samantha Nugent’s office, a spokesperson brought up someone else to blame. He said feeding the pigeons only exacerbates the problem, and also noted it’s illegal to feed pigeons in Chicago.

Signs near the underpass reminding people of the $500 fines for feeding pigeons are dilapidated and faded, and in need of replacement.

Within less than a day of CBS 2 contacting the city, the sidewalk had been cleaned of pigeon poop.

However, it doesn’t seem like the long-term problem will be fixed for good anytime soon.

The Illinois Department of Transportation said bird barriers or shields would interfere with bridge safety inspections. Just like Nugent’s office, IDOT also wagged a finger at people who feed the pigeons.

Have a Pigeon Problem?

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 eight 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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The post ‘It Stinks To High Heaven’: No Solution In Sight For Pigeon Poop Problem At Irving Park Blue Line Stop appeared first on Pigeon Patrol Canada - Bird Control Products & Services.

While the droppings are messy enough, the birds also put customer safety at risk. TransLink says they trigger track intrusion alarms, which can cause the driverless trains to brake automatically, leading to customer falls and service delays. Not to mention the smell and the various health hazards associated with bird droppings.

So TransLink and the BC SPCA have come up with a solution to help reduce the pigeon population at the VCC-Clark SkyTrain Station — birth control.

As part of a pilot project to control the population, an automatic bird feeder will be dispensing OvoControl.

(OvoControl feeder)

TransLink says it is a non-toxic, effective and humane contraception used in other cities to prevent pigeon reproduction and reduce populations naturally.

TransLink has already put up nets at stations, set up spikes and strips to deter them from roosting and hired a falconer to patrol stations with the most pigeons.

The move to provide birth control is being supported by wildlife and animal groups.

“Wildlife Rescue strives to reduce human-wildlife conflict in the urban environment and rehabilitates injured and orphaned wildlife,” Linda Bakker, co-executive director of the B.C. Wildlife Rescue Association said in a release.

“This project aims to humanely reduce the number of pigeons at areas that have a lot of potential casualties and injuries in pigeons. This project will reduce the number of injured, deceased and orphaned pigeons in these areas. Wildlife Rescue supports the BC SPCA in promoting humane wildlife management practices.”

The BC SPCA says with fewer new pigeons born, the population around the SkyTrain stations will be naturally reduced and fewer operational issues will result.

“OvoControl has been approved for use by Health Canada and only has contraceptive effects in birds,” Dr. Sara Dubois, chief scientific officer with the BC SPCA, said in a release.

“Pigeons must eat their daily dose (5g/bird) for the contraceptive to work, and it is designed to be fed in a manner to maximize pigeon feeding behaviour. We are happy TransLink is ready to partner with us and research what could be a very effective and humane long-term solution.”

Here at Pigeon Patrol, we manufacture, sell, and install humane bird exclusion products, such as bird spikes and netting. Visit our website for the latest in humane bird control products and services.

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The harris hawk and its handler have been seen several times on the roof of the county council’s social services offices in Clacton.

The airborne attacker sends seagulls and pigeons screeching into the air as the hawk is released from the roof of the Magnet House building in Jackson Road.

An Essex Council spokesman said: “Due to the continued roosting of pigeons and seagulls on top of Magnet House, our partners Mitie are currently trialling the use of a hawk as a deterrent, to prevent the build-up of bird droppings at the building’s entrances.

“This method is highly effective and environmentally friendly, as the hawk’s presence should quickly make an area undesirable for pest species, and in doing so help to keep Magnet House clean and safe in future.”

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)

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Huge flocks of them would fill the capital’s parks and squares. But something has changed. The pigeons are gone. One reason for the pigeon decline can be seen in Trafalgar Square at 7 a.m. every weekday.

Not far from Big Ben, the square is the very center of the city. Even early in the day it bustles with commuters, tourists and school parties. But among all that activity there is a hunter on the loose. A silent killer. One who watches over every movement — from the National Gallery on the north side to Charing Cross Station on the south. Up close to him, you notice powerful shoulders, a penetrating gaze — and also a tendency to twist his head around to the back looking for prey.

That hunter’s name is Lemmy, and he is a Harris’s hawk.

Lemmy is employed by the Greater London Authority to ensure that places like Trafalgar Square remain free of pigeons, and therefore free of their waste. He works in a team: his handler, Paul Picknell, is employed by Hawkforce, one of London’s leading avian security firms.

Speaking to Picknell, there is no mistaking his love for his work buddy. “He’s a work colleague, he’s a friend. [But he is] essentially a wild animal. Never tame. In amongst all these people — he’ll totally ignore everybody apart from me,” he says. “It’s almost a telepathetic communication.”

Until the early 2000s, pigeons ruled Trafalgar Square and other open spaces in the center of London. You could buy food to feed them. Even Mary Poppins had a song advising Londoners to feed the birds.

Things changed in 2003, when the mayor of London declared war on the birds. So many pigeons produced a lot of … waste. And that’s not hygienic.

The pigeon feed stall was closed. If Mary Poppins tried to feed the birds now, she would be hit with a fine. But a humane and natural way to move the pigeons on was needed. And that’s where Picknell and Lemmy come in.

As Picknell is talking, Lemmy suddenly gags and vomits up a small oily lump of yellowish paste onto the sidewalk. Picknell is relieved. “Oh. That’s what we’re waiting for,” he says. “That’s the cast. It’s basically beaks, the feathers, the claws of the food he had yesterday that he can’t digest.”

He picks it up and rubs it carefully between his fingers for a diagnosis. It crumbles under his thumbnail. “That one’s quite normal looking. Nothing wrong with this bird. He’s ready to go now.”

Although Harris’s hawks do hunt birds like pigeons, the idea is not for Lemmy to kill while on duty. He is fed exclusively from a small plastic box of raw chicken scraps. Picknell takes a large handful and fills his pocket with these snacks at the start of every shift.

Instead, the idea is to use Lemmy’s presence to deter and intimidate pigeons. “It’s a visual thing. It’s a presence,” says Picknell. “The pigeons are aware there’s a bird of prey — there’s predator around, therefore they stay away.”

There’s an air of “The Sopranos” when Picknell describes the effect Lemmy’s presence has on pigeons. “I suppose he does intimidate them,” he says. “The big kid’s around. Keep yourself to yourself. Stay out the way.”

Unlike other forms of pest control, such as poisoning or shooting, the use of hawks is environmentally friendly and ultimately humane. It is also popular: Picknell and Limmy are constantly pestered for selfies. Some hawks like the attention more than others, Picknell says. Lemmy is not too keen on having his feathers ruffled.

There was some backlash at first — a renegade pro-pigeon activist group is still rumored to carry out vigilante bread distributions somewhere nearby — but the square today is much cleaner. And almost completely free of pigeons.

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)

The post London’s Pigeon Problem has a Simple Solution: a Hawk appeared first on Pigeon Patrol Canada - Bird Control Products & Services.

“I normally choose imported medicines, which are several times more expensive than some local brands,” Wang told Reuters as he lined up to enter birds for contests that begin this month.

The cost of vaccination is small change compared with how much pigeon enthusiasts can pay to buy prized breeds.

An egg can cost a few hundred dollars, while the price for a full-grown bird with a coveted bloodline can run into hundreds of thousands of dollars.

In 2013, a Chinese businessman paid 310,000 euros (nearly $334,000) for a Belgian-bred racing pigeon, whereas local birds can be bought for less than $100.

Wang doesn’t want to say how much he has invested in his birds, though he spends almost $1,500 a month looking after their health, and describes his pastime as wagering time and money.

“Pigeon racing is essentially gambling. We are betting our time and fortune on the birds, similar to horse-betting,” Wang said.

Any form of gambling is banned in China, but pigeon races, which are flown over hundreds of kilometers, fall under the gray category of social sports.

China hosts more than 100,000 pigeon races annually, some of them organized by corporate-backed professional pigeon clubs like Huashunde, supported by Beijing Huashunde Power Engineering Ltd, and Hongjin Pigeon Club, backed by PetroChina Huabei Oil Field Co.

Prize money has been rising. A club in Beijing is set to award 70 million yuan (over $10 million) in total prize money at its autumn championship.

Ge, a 39-year-old pigeon owner in Fujian, has 80 pigeons. So far, they have helped him win 150,000 yuan (nearly $22,000).

“We aim for good scores and big rewards at contests,” said Ge. “Otherwise, why raise pigeons?”

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)

The post Spring in the air, China’s pigeon racers give birds their meds appeared first on Pigeon Patrol Canada - Bird Control Products & Services.

Pigeon lofts, towering structures made of wood, balance atop hundreds of buildings in poorer neighbourhoods across the city. They house thousands of highly trained birds that would have otherwise found a home at a butcher’s.

Different breeds, whose speed, colouring and markings vary, can cost thousands of pounds per bird, and in Cairo the market for them is highly competitive.

“We enjoy it, we can stay up there from 7 in the morning until midnight, just doing what we love,” Sayed Mohamed, a pigeon fancier, told Reuters.

Mohamed’s loft is four stories high and overlooks a 15th-century complex built by Mameluk Sultan al-Ashraf Qaitbey, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. In the afternoon, he releases his pigeons – first his most prized birds, later the entire flock.

The birds understand a complex series of whistles and gestures that signal for them to fly higher or to come home. They fly far and wide, usually making their way back to the loft by nightfall. They often return with other pigeons.

“You can think of it like a shared language. They’re used to certain patterns, so if they land at another loft and notice something unfamiliar, they know it’s not home,” Mohamed said.

In the evening, Mohamed and other fanciers gather around local coffee shops to brag about stealing one other’s birds, each taking pride in the day’s catch.

Mohamed first picked up the hobby in his childhood, going with his uncle to the family pigeon loft and feeding the birds.

“I started doing this out of love … but I later learned that you also have to use it to make profit, you can’t just keep buying more pigeons,” Mohamed told Reuters.

Fanciers carefully breed their birds and often sell young pigeons to traders on a lucrative market.

“When [my brother and I] moved out, we got jobs and we bought houses and the first thing we did, even before getting married, was that we built our loft,” he said. “It makes us feel alive.”

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)

The post Egypt’s pigeons soar above wooden towers, away from the dinner plate appeared first on Pigeon Patrol Canada - Bird Control Products & Services.

And the move is ruffling Gordon Loucks’ feathers.

Dozens of pigeons can be seen perched or flying around his home, which he calls the “Club Med” for birds. For years, Loucks said he’s been racing and training mainly doves and pigeons — or what he calls rock doves. He gives them food, water and shelter. Because of this, he said other feral birds have migrated to his property.

While he said he’s received permits from the city before, he doesn’t have one for this year. Loucks said he was denied, told he has too many birds which violates a bylaw that states “all yards, buildings, and structures shall be kept free of infestations of vermin, rodents, pigeons and insects.”

He said you are allowed to have 90 birds, but the city determined he was over that number, and so did he, admitting he was over too.

“They’re not my birds,” he insisted on the feral pigeons attracted to his house. “I can’t control these birds from coming into my yard.”

Loucks claimed some of his neighbours have complained. But he backs the birds up, and said those who call them flying rats are just uneducated. He believes there is no difference between a dove and a pigeon, saying they’re the same bird, just a different colour.

He wanted to turn a hobby into a full time business, claiming the city had actually previously paid him thousands of dollars to release doves at various municipal functions over the years.

Now, the city giving him 30 days to remove the birds. It’s a ruling he recently went to city hall to appeal, but the decision was ultimately upheld.

“Everybody’s dream is to be financially independent. Well, they screwed my dream,” he said.

He believes the bylaw needs an update to reflect someone in his unique circumstance.

“There’s nothing in the bylaw for people who are using it for livelihood; for financial reasons.”

Loucks said he has until April 1 to remove all birds, both his own and the feral ones. He’ll comply, but only to a certain point he suggests.

“I will remove the wild ones, get in accordance with the compliance with the city for the number of birds,” he said, adding at that point the city can then come back and count the remaining birds.

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)

The post City orders dozens of pigeons to be removed from Regina home appeared first on Pigeon Patrol Canada - Bird Control Products & Services.

“I normally choose imported medicines, which are several times more expensive than some local brands,” Wang told Reuters as he lined up to enter birds for contests that begin this month.

The cost of vaccination is small change compared with how much pigeon enthusiasts can pay to buy prized breeds.

An egg can cost a few hundred dollars, while the price for a full-grown bird with a coveted bloodline can run into hundreds of thousands of dollars.

In 2013, a Chinese businessman paid 310,000 euros (nearly $334,000) for a Belgian-bred racing pigeon, whereas local birds can be bought for less than $100.

Wang doesn’t want to say how much he has invested in his birds, though he spends almost $1,500 a month looking after their health, and describes his pastime as wagering time and money.

“Pigeon racing is essentially gambling. We are betting our time and fortune on the birds, similar to horse-betting,” Wang said.

Any form of gambling is banned in China, but pigeon races, which are flown over hundreds of kilometers, fall under the gray category of social sports.

China hosts more than 100,000 pigeon races annually, some of them organized by corporate-backed professional pigeon clubs like Huashunde, supported by Beijing Huashunde Power Engineering Ltd, and Hongjin Pigeon Club, backed by PetroChina Huabei Oil Field Co.

Prize money has been rising. A club in Beijing is set to award 70 million yuan (over $10 million) in total prize money at its autumn championship.

Ge, a 39-year-old pigeon owner in Fujian, has 80 pigeons. So far, they have helped him win 150,000 yuan (nearly $22,000).

“We aim for good scores and big rewards at contests,” said Ge. “Otherwise, why raise pigeons?”

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)

The post Spring in the air, China’s pigeon racers give birds their meds appeared first on Pigeon Patrol Canada - Bird Control Products & Services.

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)

The post China’s pigeon racers give birds their medicines appeared first on Pigeon Patrol Canada - Bird Control Products & Services.

Pacha Lounge Ltd admitted failing to comply with an Improvement Notice served under the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974 at Mansfield Magistrates’ Court on March 2.

The bar, on Market Place, was fined £5,000 by the court on March 8 and ordered to pay a victim surcharge of £170 plus costs of £1,062 after failing to act on the notice.

Environmental Health Officers visited Pacha Lounge after receiving a complaint and found damaged bird proofing at the side of the premises in Market Place, dead pigeons on the yard floor and large amounts of bird droppings on items stored in the yard.

Mr Xhetan Bushi, a director of the company, was advised that work was required to improve the yard but this was not carried out within a reasonable time so Mansfield District Council prosecuted after Pacha Lounge failed to act.

The council’s portfolio holder for public protection, councillor Mick Barton, said: “Companies do have a responsibility for health and safety, and the council will act, where necessary, to ensure that companies meet that obligation.”

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)

The post Notts cocktail bar fined after dead pigeons and bird droppings found in yard appeared first on Pigeon Patrol Canada - Bird Control Products & Services.