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 lined the ArcLight theaters near the straits of Fame, commandeered the roof at mountainous Lots!, perched along causation lines like stolid bearded darnel pieces. Pigeons, Traill says in his video, shakily framing one roost. Pigeons, he says again, racking his camera toward another(prenominal). The effect is nauseating. everyplace there, he says. all over there. Over there.\nTraill is one of a half-dozen part activists whose volunteer campaign against these birds has escalated idiosyncratically for to a greater extent than a year. Their leader, Laura Dodson, had ordered him extinct on yet another round of surveillance, to update the hosts hulking pigeon dossier. Were kind of an unusual approach 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 the clipped, mildly aggressive way she says a stage set of things. But having helped muscle gangs and drugs break of her neighborhood in the 80s, Dodson says she feels besieged again. She and her group, the Argyle civil Association, have turned to a series of unconventional approaches to waste a problem they barely refuse to put up with. Were in the essence of the biggest knock down, and theres pigeons all over - like where theyre way out 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 excrement a year. Often this guck must be blasted off hard-to-reach places using boom lifts and steam hoses. Pigeon-related damage in America has been estimated to cost $1.1 billion a year. But the overflowing scope of our disdain and intuition for the birds is impossible to quantify; its hard even to explain. Marke...