Pigeon Flap at Retirement Home : Nuisance: Tenants in Norwalk’s tallest building are losing a fight against beady-eyed interlopers. Can a councilman prevail where plastic owls and rubber snakes fail?

Sometimes it’s a tossup who rules the roost at Laura Buza’s top-floor apartment in Norwalk’s tallest building.

Is it 78-year-old Buza, who has lived at the Norwalk Christian Towers since the high-rise retirement home opened nearly 15 years ago?

Or is it the pigeons, which have increasingly flocked to the 11-story structure like swallows to Capistrano?

Dozens of the birds have moved onto the building’s 185 balconies, where they lay eggs and leave droppings and brazenly stare, beady-eyed, at the human inhabitants.

The pigeon proliferation has worried Buza and her 225 neighbors and prompted a citywide campaign to find a way to chase away the creatures.

“They look in the window to see if I’m here,” Buza said. “If I am, they know I’ll throw something at them. But they don’t care.”

Residents have tried without success to chase away the birds with brooms, gaudy balcony flags made from rags, tinkling chimes, menacing-looking rubber snakes, wooden geese, whirling pinwheels and even plastic grocery bags that flap in the breeze.

Last month, Norwalk City Councilman Rod Rodriguez issued a call for Norwalk residents to purchase $15 plastic owls to scare off the pigeons as a civic Christmas gift to the senior citizens. That idea laid its own egg.

“I didn’t get any donations. But I got plenty of suggestions,” said Rodriguez, who is a Norwalk insurance agent. Like poison. And trapping and killing.

But many at the Baptist church-sponsored retirement home prefer bird education over bird eradication.

“They do leave a lot of, well, dirt behind them,” explained Doris Deeds, assistant manager of the towers. “But they’re one of God’s little creatures.”

Building superintendent Elvin Rhodman said he purchased a wire cage and managed to trap one of the birds. “But I didn’t have the heart to kill him. I turned him loose.”

This week, Rhodman and Rodriguez met with towers management company supervisor David Honigberg atop the building to do some pigeon plotting. Honigberg said his company has tried nearly everything.

“We plan next to try to trap them and relocate them,” Honigberg said, gazing from the high-rise roof toward Bellflower, Carson, Torrance and Palos Verdes Estates in the distance. “To a city to be named later.”

Downstairs, the trio encountered 67-year-old Helyn Jones, who led them to her dropping-flecked 10th-floor balcony. Jones said ceramic wind chimes she hung on the balcony frightened the birds off for awhile.

“I’m afraid they’ve gotten used to it,” she shrugged. “Some days it’s unbelievable. You can’t scare them off. You have to take a broom and knock them off.”

Jones, who has lived in the towers for 12 years, promised Rodriguez: “I’ll love you forever if you get rid of the pigeons.”

Ninth-floor resident Georgia Rutt, who said she had to remove furniture from her balcony when the pigeons took to nesting in it, had a different pledge for the councilman. “We’re going to be seeing at the next election what the pigeon situation is,” she warned with a grin.

Rodriguez acknowledged he didn’t know what he was getting into when he promised a constituent that he would tackle the pigeon problem--something that has vexed politicians in Los Angeles and other cities for years. But he assured the 72-year-old Rutt that he will hunt for a humane solution.

That means pigeon control at the Norwalk Christian Towers will be done on a wing and a prayer.