A City of Free-Roaming Pigeons

For ten age this August, a fresh-faced 41year-old named Jeffrey Traill trolled Hollywood in his Honda, videotaping pigeons. Pigeons lined the ArcLight theaters near the passing of Fame, commandeered the roof at big Lots!, perched along forcefulness lines like stolid darnel pieces. Pigeons, Traill says in his video, shakily soma one roost. Pigeons, he says again, wrenching his camera toward some other. The effect is nauseating. everyplace there, he says. everyplace there. Over there.\nTraill is one of a half-dozen area activists whose volunteer campaign against these birds has escalated idiosyncratically for more(prenominal) than a year. Their leader, Laura Dodson, had ordered him emerge on yet another round of surveillance, to update the radicals hulking pigeon dossier. Were kind of an unusual vicinity association, Dodson told me.\nDodson has lived in Hollywood for 29 years. She likes pigeons and does not want them killed or made to suffer. She said this repeatedly in t he clipped, mildly aggressive way she says a sess of things. But having helped muscle gangs and drugs come to the fore of her neighborhood in the 80s, Dodson says she feels besieged again. She and her group, the Argyle civic Association, have turned to a series of unconventional approaches to ware a problem they barely refuse to put up with. Were in the midpoint of the biggest smash up, and theres pigeons everywhere - like where theyre passing to put the W hotel, she says, invoking, as she often does, the upscale hotel as a symbol of Hollywoods hard-won renaissance. Theres nothing but pigeon poop. A pigeon dispenses about 25 pounds of voiding a year. Often this max must be blest off hard-to-reach places using boom lifts and steam hoses. Pigeon-related damage in America has been estimated to cost $1.1 cardinal a year. But the serious scope of our disdain and mistrust for the birds is impossible to quantify; its hard even to explain. Marke...