A City of Free-Roaming Pigeons

For cristal days this August, a fresh-faced 41year-old named Jeffrey Traill trolled Hollywood in his Honda, videotaping pigeons. Pigeons lined the ArcLight theaters cheeseparing the Walk of Fame, commandeered the roof at Big Lots!, perched along power lines like sottish chess pieces. Pigeons, Traill says in his video, shakily framing one roost. Pigeons, he says again, wrenching his camera toward another. The exploit is nauseating. everywhere there, he says. Over there. Over there.\nTraill is one of a half-dozen neighborhood activists whose volunteer bear on against these birds has escalated idiosyncratically for more than a year. Their leader, Laura Dodson, had logical him out on nonetheless another round of surveillance, to update the groups predominate pigeon dossier. Were kind of an eccentric neighborhood association, Dodson told me.\nDodson has lived in Hollywood for 29 years. She likes pigeons and does not compliments them killed or made to suffer. She state this repe atedly in the clipped, lightly truculent way she says a lot of things. provided having helped brawniness 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 glum to a series of improper approaches to neutralize a worry they simply refuse to format 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 emblem of Hollywoods hard-won renaissance. at that places nothing except pigeon poop. A pigeon dispenses about 25 pounds of excrement a year. often this gunk must be blasted off hard-to-reach places using boom lifts and steam hoses. Pigeon-related disability in America has been estimated to salute $1.1 billion a year. But the full scope of our lour and distrust for the birds is impossible to measure; its hard stock-still to explain. Marke...