Downtown Pigeons Spared; Future Is Still Up in the Air

The pigeons of the City Hall environs, sentenced to death by the city General Services Administration last month, have won a reprieve.

The city Animal Regulation Department said Monday that it has declined to issue a permit to allow the trapping and killing of the birds, the freeloaders that hang out in the dining areas of the Los Angeles Mall.

Newspaper Story

“I didn’t even know about it (the plan) until I read a story in The (April 6) Times,” said Robert Rush, the agency general manager at a meeting of the Board of Animal Regulation Commissioners.

Animal Regulation declared that the moratorium, pending further study, was issued soon after the article appeared and before any of the controversial creatures could be killed. Last year, General Services was granted permission to trap and lethally inject about 800 of the birds.

But one question remained unanswered: Is there a pigeon problem downtown?

The Animal Regulation Board said there was, and instructed Rush to solicit the advice of experts to make it go away.

Rush ruled out such weapons as fake owls, poison (“What if a street person eats the dead pigeon?”) and sterilized feed (“It might wipe out songbirds and state-protected doves”).

Commissioner Arthur L. Margolis asked why the board should be concerned about the sterilization of a few songbirds and doves.

“We look upon it as inhumane,” Rush said.

“But killing them’s less inhumane?” Margolis said.

Rush said trapped birds can’t be released elsewhere “because they just come back.”

At one point, board President Martin B. Hochman joked that perhaps the commissioners should “ask the mayor’s office to buy a ceremonial cannon and fire it off every 15 minutes.”

Raye Cunningham, representing Mayor Tom Bradley’s office, said opinion seems to be divided about the pigeons.

“City employees who’ve left their windows open at night have found out that they (pigeons) can really mess up a room,” she said.

She said some mall diners have complained of the feathered interlopers, but others have pointed out, “If they can handle them in Rome, why can’t we?”

Nonlethal Control

Unbeknown to the Animal Regulation Board, the GSA’s Building Services agency says it has been successfully managing the pigeon problem with nonlethal means since being denied the use of capital punishment. (No GSA representative was invited to the board meeting Monday.)

Bob King, director of Building Services, said in a telephone interview that he has had success with “a hot-foot, gooey” substance the birds don’t like to land upon, wire prongs that also make for an uncomfortable touchdown, ledges that are stacked high with sheet metal, and scarecrow owls.

The owls, King admitted, “only work for a while in one place. Then they (the enemy) get used to them and you have to move them.”

King said he may also try another type of barrier, a thin metal coil that is placed on ledges. It’s disliked by the “rats with wings” (as Woody Allen and others have called them) because its surface is too wobbly. The Los Angeles Harbor Department is using the barriers “with success” in San Pedro, he pointed out.

Since last year’s executions, King said the pigeon populace had creeped back to an unacceptable level of 300 or so last month but now is in decline.

“I was out there (in the mall) Thursday and I saw only about a dozen,” he said.

Then he added, somewhat somberly, “I was out there Friday and I must have seen 100 on the ledges of City Hall East, so I guess there’s still 150 or so.”