FOR THE BIRDS.(The Talk of the Town)

For every pigeon-lover--Mike Tyson, Marlon Brando, the gentleman with the stale bread--there are a thousand citizens who can name the danger zones, those spots so populated with pigeons that human passage invites bombardment. In Jackson Heights, there's the corner of Seventy-third and Roosevelt, beneath the elevated No. 7 tracks. On the East Side: Eighty-sixth and Lex., southwest corner, and the Plaza's plaza--a fine mess to go along with the wafts of horse manure. Over on Broadway, these days, the threat level is highest at Seventy-third Street, on the mall. (Remember: Broadway, uptown, is a proper boulevard.) The park bench there, beneath a stark steel trellis, is perpetually empty owing to a stratum of guano.

The mall between Seventy-third and Seventy-fourth Streets was supposed to be a model urban garden. Two years ago, the site was selected for a national design competition, run by the Broadway Mall Association. The winning plan, by a landscape-architecture student from Texas, called for vine-covered trellises at either end, and for an elegant arrangement of perennials in between, amid the London planes and hawthorns and oaks. It was chosen in part because, as the Times noted, it "stood a good chance of surviving in a tough environment." Twenty-five thousand dollars was spent on the initial planting--which was promptly ravaged, as the mall became a more pleasant place to scavenge and roost. Another attempt at planting, last spring, resulted in more devastation.

Enter the audio stratagem. Now, every seven or eight minutes, during the daylight hours, a loud and unfamiliar dose of birdsong overwhelms the block for about forty seconds: wailing, whistling, screeching; one distinctly unpigeon-like call after the next, in rapid succession. Passersby stop and crane their necks. At lunchtime, early last week, an elderly woman crossed the street and set foot on the mall just as the chorus was beginning. She put her hand to her heart. "I only jaywalked, and all of a sudden they start screaming," she said, looking around in bewilderment. She fixed on the pigeons--nah, couldn't be--and then spotted the source: a small green device affixed to a traffic light, about twelve feet up. "Maybe that's supposed to scare away all the pigeons, instead of attracting them?" she said.

Correct. Parks Department officials, acting at the request of the mall association, installed the speaker two months ...