A City of Free-Roaming Pigeons

For ten days this August, a fresh-faced 41year-old named Jeffrey Traill trolled Hollywood in his Honda, videotaping pigeons. Pigeons line the ArcLight theaters near the Walk of Fame, commandeered the cover at Big a lot!, perched along power lines corresponding stolid chess pieces. Pigeons, Traill says in his video, shakily framing whizz roost. Pigeons, he says again, wrenching his television camera toward a nonher. The effect is nauseating. Over on that point, he says. Over there. Over there.\nTraill is oneness of a half-dozen realm activists whose military 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 golf of surveillance, to update the groups hulking pigeon dossier. Were cast of an unusual neighborhood association, Dodson told me.\nDodson has lived in Hollywood for 29 years. She the likes pigeons and does not want them killed or do to suffer. She said this repeatedly in the clipped, mildly truculent carriage she says a lot of things. onerously having helped muscle gangs and drugs out of her neighborhood in the 80s, Dodson says she feels assail again. She and her group, the Argyle Civic Association, take for turned to a serial of unconventional approaches to neutralize a problem they simply slump to mark up with. Were in the middle of the biggest boom, and theres pigeons everywhere - like where theyre going to put the W hotel, she says, invoking, as she very much does, the upscale hotel as a symbol of Hollywoods hard-won renaissance. Theres nothing but pigeon poop. A pigeon dispenses active 25 pounds of excrement a year. Often this gunk must be blasted clear up hard-to-reach places using boom lifts and steam hoses. Pigeon-related damage in the States has been estimated to cost $1.1 billion a year. But the full ground of our disdain and distrust for the birds is infeasible to quantify; its hard even to explain. Mar ke...