He’s Perched Firmly on the Pigeons’ Side

Some people like pigeons; some don’t.

They bring life to otherwise sterile public squares; there is music in the flutter of their wings and in their throaty cooing ; they deflate the pompous by perching on the heads of our heroic statues; they cheer the lonely. Imagine a park without them.

On the other hand, they’re intrusive, impudent and dirty.

But I was disturbed when I heard that City Hall has undertaken the mass “euthanasia” of the pigeons that frequent its lawns.

I first learned of this program in a letter from John Owen, a City Hall employee for 22 years. He said that Bob King, city building services director, had publicly admitted this previously unpublicized project.

“Down here is nothing but concrete and steel,” Owen said. “Except of course for the pigeons. They are a delight. They accompany those lunching on the mall. Sometimes one lights on the ledge outside my window. . . .”

But some of the pigeons evidently had flown into the City Council chamber, he said, ruffling the dignity of its habitues. “I think it’s great. They add some beauty and honesty to the proceedings--traits that are usually missing from the deliberations. The problem is, for these gifts the city seems to want to kill them. . . .”

Then publisher Sue Laris took up the story in her vigilant Downtown News. Reporter Steve Sibilsky confirmed that hundreds of pigeons had already been trapped and put to death.

“We did it last year,” he quoted King as saying. “We estimated there were about 800 of them living around City Hall and the Mall at that time. Now the numbers are up to about 300 again. We don’t want to let it get so far out of hand this time.” He said the pigeons were live-trapped and then turned over to Animal Regulation.

Sibilsky also talked to Mike Burns of Animal Regulation. Burns said, “Any pigeons we trap, we destroy. We have tried hauling them as far as 50 miles away, and they just come right back.”

So if you’ve missed seeing large numbers of pigeons in the Civic Center lately, that’s where they’ve gone. Away.

I called Bob King. He sounded like a nice man. Open and amiable. “I have mixed emotions about it myself,” he admitted. He said the pigeons were trapped by a private contractor. I asked him if he knew what happened to them after that.

“I don’t know,” he said, “and I don’t really care to know.”

I didn’t really care to know either. I didn’t ask Mike Burns. However the birds are destroyed, they probably don’t enjoy it.

The next day The Times had a story by Sheryl Stolberg confirming the City Hall’s renewed roundup, along with a story about a nonlethal method being tried at the San Pedro headquarters of the Harbor Department. It is a long wobbly coil that runs along the building’s open ledges and girders. Pigeons can’t perch on it.

To renew an old acquaintance, I asked Downtown News publisher Laris to lunch. Her paper had been instrumental in getting the city’s fountains turned back on several years ago.

We walked into the City Council chamber. We saw no pigeons there. Not feathered pigeons, anyway. A uniformed guard told us he hadn’t seen any pigeons in the chamber for years. “On hot days, when we used to open the windows for cross-ventilation,” he said, “they used to fly in.”

We walked around in the mall. There were pigeons, but not, I felt, too many pigeons. A day or two later I had lunch by myself on the mall, eating a tuna melt at a small table under the canopy near the totem pole fountain. I dropped some tuna on the deck and three pigeons waddled over and cleaned it up. None landed on my table.

They seemed like rather good company to me, and not threatening in the least. But King says he has received many complaints about pigeons and only one about the population reduction program.

I am reminded of the story about the bobby who preserved order in Hyde Park when a group of anti-monarchists clashed with a group of monarchists.

He shouted: “All those as is for the Queen, line up over here! And all those as is against the Queen, line up over there!”

All those as is for the pigeons, line up here.