A big flap over Venice’s pigeons

The pigeons are hungry.

They march, single-mindedly, beaks thrust forward, beady eyes darting, crisscrossing the stones of St. Mark’s Square, moving in undulating formation across the open spaces, whirring like helicopters in the distance, dive-bombing at the first hint of a piece of bread or a chip. Soot-gray, with spindly coral-colored legs and claws, many just pace, pecking at stone in the hopes it will yield a crumb.

This fabled city’s plan to starve away the pigeons seems to be working.

Or maybe not.

Venetian pirates to the rescue!

A band of animal lovers armed with skull-and-crossbones flags zips over the choppy Venice lagoon in speedboats. They dock at the palace-lined piazza, lug out 20-pound sacks of birdseed and scatter the food for all to eat. Or peck.

The pirate pigeon-saviors have made three lightning raids into St. Mark’s, the first two at the crack of dawn and now, at midday, to deliberately confront the police and their ban on feeding the birds.

So goes Venice’s battle over its ever-multiplying pigeons. “Flying rats,” in the view of the mayor -- airborne menaces that poop all over precious, centuries-old marble statues. “Cool,” in the view of many tourists -- can you imagine a picture of St. Mark’s without them?

Part One of the city’s anti-pigeon plan, launched May 1, was to force the 19 licensed bird feed vendors to close their kiosks. Eventually, people trying to feed the birds will be fined, city officials say. “The problem is the number,” says Pierantonio Belcaro, Venice’s chief environmental officer. By City Hall’s calculation, Venice should accommodate, ideally, about 2,400 pigeons. Instead, he says, there are 60,000.

“Overfeeding is a problem because those that are ill and not strong live longer than they should,” Belcaro says from his office overlooking the Grand Canal. “It is no longer a natural thing.”

Plus, the ornate nooks and crannies of Venice’s Byzantine, Gothic and Renaissance towers and palazzos provide abundant places for pigeons to roost and reproduce.

The overpopulation of pigeons, the city says, damages art and architecture, costs millions in cleanup and repair, spreads disease and draws endless complaints from hoteliers, restaurateurs and other merchants who say their customers are being attacked.

Once the mighty center of a seafaring empire, Venice has fought off predators for centuries, from invading armies coveting its strategic location and ample wealth, to the rising ocean tides that are slowly engulfing its islands.

Modern times brought a new set of threats, including smog, water pollution, hordes of tourists and the pigeons.

Officials argue that the pigeons’ highly acidic guano seeps into fissures in thousands of marble monuments and building facades, weakening the structures. In addition, they scratch and peck at the marble, seeking its calcium content as a nutrient, doing further costly damage.

Renata Codello, an official with the Italian Cultural Works Ministry, says the pigeons are destroying Venice’s architectural heritage. The poop, she says, is a biohazard, igniting a chain reaction producing algae, spores and fungus, while the birds are potential carriers of diseases and nasty bugs.

In a report last year, Codello recommended an “urgent” reduction of feeding.

Pigeon supporters dispute the official contentions, saying the steady erosion of monuments, mosaics and architecture is a long-term problem that is caused at least as much by pollution and the onslaught of reckless visitors. And though some activists agree there are too many pigeons, they say the city must be more humane in thinning out the flocks.

“They treat the pigeons like they were demons,” says Paolo Mocavero, head of the 100% Animalisti organization that conducts the pirate feeding operations.

The city’s decade-old practice of using wide nets to capture pigeons is especially objectionable, activists say.

“The pigeons suffer a lot,” says Gianpaolo Pamio of the Bird Protection League. “I want to know what the city is doing with the pigeons. Are they going to end up on our plates?”

Actually, the city makes no bones about what happens to the estimated 12,000 birds that are captured each year. They are killed.

“It’s sad, but what can we do?” Belcaro says. He dismisses alternatives that activists propose, such as trying to ply the birds with contraceptives. Birth control, which has to be consumed regularly, is difficult to administer efficiently in such a huge, nomadic population, he says.

Even in the first weeks of the birdseed ban policy (pirate feedings aside), Belcaro says, he already sees success in a notable decline in the number of birds congregating in St. Mark’s Square.

True, there may be slightly fewer of them, but they seem to be getting a bit more aggressive. After all, food shortages often lead to riots.

Under the porticoes of the creamy Doges’ Palace on a sun-filled late morning in May, one pigeon went after a woman with an apple. She danced and bobbed to get away, screaming, “Let me go! GO AWAY!” Still, most of the waddling bevies of tourists seemed to delight in the pigeons. Americans, Russians and Japanese played the stunt of stretching out arms, then squealing when birds alighted, as friends and family snapped photos. One Spanish-speaking woman had no fewer than 10 pigeons on her arms, shoulders, head and purse. Real Hitchcock material.

“I like the pigeons,” says tourist Hunter Latour, 18, from West Palm Beach, Fla. “It’s part of the experience of coming to Venice and to St. Mark’s, the attraction. Take that away and you lose something.”

Venice, for good and for bad, is Italy’s third-largest tourist destination after Rome and Florence, counting nearly 20 million visitors a year. And though the season is still young, St. Mark’s Square was packed the other day.

Long lines snaked from the domed basilica, its mosaics sparkling in the sun, and more lines led from the 12th-century Campanile. At a sidewalk cafe where Proust once hung out, a musical sextet, accordion included, played “Volare.” Tourists hummed along. On the edge of the hyperactive piazza, where the water begins, gondoliers dressed, yes, in ribbon-banded hats and striped shirts offered rides in their sleek black vessels.

Francesca Bortolotto Possati, chief executive of Venice’s very fancy Bauer Hotel, with its Murano glass chandeliers and python skin-covered lobby chairs, says she has done everything to rid her fabulous rooftop terrace of annoying pigeons that literally try to steal the panini from guests’ hands. They tried fishnet tenting, artificial decoy hawks (the wind blew them into the lagoon) and, finally, ultrasound, which only seemed to bother the guests, she says.

Bortolotto Possati, Venetian-born and a third-generation hotelier, argues that pigeons are not a historic fixture of Venice but a (relatively) recent addition, having been ordered up by Napoleon after his conquest of the last of the doges at the end of the 18th century. The French ruler thought the pigeons would make a nice, ornamental touch, so the legend goes.

“Before that, there were cats, but no pigeons, and the splendor of the city was not affected,” she says.

Aside from the hungry pigeons, the other real casualties of the city’s new policy are the erstwhile vendors. They’ve been forced to pack up the stands where for decades they had sold birdseed, tuppence a bag. Well, one euro a bag.

The city has offered the vendors the chance to set up souvenir stands. But does Venice really need more of those? Already, the promenade along the Riva degli Schiavoni facing the lagoon is cluttered with kiosks selling cheap Carnival masks and glass earrings. Most of the birdseed vendors, who see themselves as part of a special component of the highly prized Venetian tourism experience, are not keen to accept.

“The pigeons are a part of the history of Venice,” vendor Daniela D’Este says. Take away the pigeons, she says, and “it’s like Venice without the gondolas.”

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wilkinson@latimes.com

Maria De Cristofaro of The Times’ Rome Bureau contributed to this report.