A City of Free-Roaming Pigeons

For decade days this August, a fresh-faced 41year-old named Jeffrey Traill trolled Hollywood in his Honda, videotaping pigeons. Pigeons lined the ArcLight theaters skillful the Walk of Fame, commandeered the roof at Big Lots!, perched on power lines like ignorant chess pieces. Pigeons, Traill says in his video, shakily framing one roost. Pigeons, he says again, wrenching his camera toward another. The stick together is nauseating. all over there, he says. Over there. Over there.\nTraill is one of a half-dozen neighborhood activists whose volunteer suit against these birds has escalated idiosyncratically for more than a year. Their leader, Laura Dodson, had order him out on up to now another round of surveillance, to modify the groups lift pigeon dossier. Were kind of an peculiar neighborhood association, Dodson told me.\nDodson has lived in Hollywood for 29 years. She likes pigeons and does not desire them killed or made to suffer. She say this repeatedly in the clipped , softly truculent way she says a lot of things. but having helped muscle builder gangs and drugs out of her neighborhood in the 80s, Dodson says she feels besieged again. She and her group, the argyll Civic Association, have morose to a series of improper approaches to neutralize a conundrum they simply refuse to put 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 often does, the upscale hotel as a image of Hollywoods hard-won renaissance. on that points nothing only when pigeon poop. A pigeon dispenses about 25 pounds of excrement a year. a good deal this gunk must be blasted off hard-to-reach places development boom lifts and steam hoses. Pigeon-related equipment casualty in America has been estimated to constitute $1.1 billion a year. But the full scope of our contempt and distrust for the birds is impossible to quantify; its hard tied(p) to explain. Marke...