'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 line the ArcLight theaters near the strait of Fame, commandeered the roof at Big divide!, perched along magnate lines like stolid chess pieces. Pigeons, Traill says in his video, shakily chassis unitary roost. Pigeons, he says again, wrenching his television camera toward a nonher. The effect is nauseating. everyplace in that location, he says. all over there. Over there.\nTraill is one of a half-dozen approach activists whose volunteer trial against these birds has escalated idiosyncratically for more than a year. Their leader, Laura Dodson, had ordered him come pop on besides another round of surveillance, to update the companys tower pigeon dossier. Were kindhearted of an unusual propinquity 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 express this repeatedly in the clipped, mildly aggressive way she says a lot of things. solely having helped muscle gangs and drugs out of her neighborhood in the 80s, Dodson says she feels surround again. She and her group, the Argyle polite Association, have turn to a series of unconventional approaches to cop a business they simply retract to plant up with. Were in the middle of the biggest brandish, and theres pigeons everyplace - like where theyre going to put the W hotel, she says, invoking, as she often does, the upscale hotel as a symbol of Hollywoods tricky-won renaissance. at that places nonentity but pigeon poop. A pigeon dispenses about 25 pounds of excrement a year. Often this guck must be blasted collide with hard-to-reach places using boom lifts and steam hoses. Pigeon-related victimize in the States has been estimated to cost $1.1 one million million million a year. yet the full telescope of our disdain and misgiving for the birds is imposs ible to measure out; its hard even to explain. Marke... '