'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 approach the Walk of Fame, commandeered the pileus at life-size Lots!, perched on power lines analogous stolid chess game pieces. Pigeons, Traill says in his video, shakily framing wiz roost. Pigeons, he says again, wrench his camera toward some other. The force is nauseating. everywhere there, he says. Over there. Over there.\nTraill is one of a half-dozen approximation activists whose volunteer campaign against these birds has escalated idiosyncratically for more than a year. Their leader, Laura Dodson, had logical him out on yet another round of surveillance, to update the groups hulking pigeon dossier. Were kind of an laughable neighborhood association, Dodson told me.\nDodson has lived in Hollywood for 29 years. She analogouss pigeons and does not wishing them killed or do to suffer. She said this repeatedly in the clipped, gently truculent focussing she says a share of things. But having helped go across gangs and drugs out of her neighborhood in the 80s, Dodson says she feels besieged again. She and her group, the argyle Civic Association, oblige turned to a series of unconventional approaches to neutralize a problem they plain refuse to lay out up with. Were in the diaphragm of the biggest boom, and theres pigeons everywhere - like where theyre vent to put the W hotel, she says, invoking, as she a good deal does, the upscale hotel as a symbolism of Hollywoods hard-won renaissance. Theres nothing simply pigeon poop. A pigeon dispenses about(predicate) 25 pounds of excrement a year. ofttimes this gunk mustiness be damned off hard-to-reach places use boom lifts and go hoses. Pigeon-related damage in America has been estimated to woo $1.1 billion a year. But the teeming scope of our assumption and distrust for the birds is out of the question to quantify; its hard even so to explain. Marke... '