Birdnap.(The Talk of the Town)(abduction of birds)

Last month, the National Audubon Society issued a paper documenting a decline in the populations of many common American birds, including bobwhites, whip-poor-wills, grackles, and grosbeaks. The study did not list the feral domestic pigeon as a species under siege, but apparently it is--at least, in certain local precincts. In Greenwich Village, residents are reporting a Columba livia domestica crime wave. Like the Upper East Side flock-nappings of a few years back, this recent spate of abductions has become a heated mystery, giving rise to the feeling, among residents, of having stepped into an episode of "Law & Order: Avian Victims Unit."

Judith Monaco Callet was walking her neighbor's dog one afternoon in April when she saw a man in an S.U.V. with tinted windows park on the west side of LaGuardia, near Bleecker. The man--Callet thinks he was Caucasian, and wearing a cap--got out of the S.U.V., crossed the street, and threw a big pile of birdseed onto the pavement. "Out of the corner of my eye," Callet said the other day, "I saw a big black net, like a butterfly or fishing net. So I see it moving, and I'm thinking somebody's lost a cat. The guy swooped the net up, closed it off, and there he went." He made off with about fifteen pigeons.

A few feet away, in LaGuardia Corner Gardens, was Wilhelmine Hellmann, a retired electron microscopist, tending to her peach tree. "Wilhelmine shouted, 'Get the license plate!' " Callet recalled. Callet managed to jot down the number before the S.U.V. sped away. She called the police and, later, the Villager, which noted the incident. "Someone is scooping up Village pigeons and no one knows why," the paper warned.

In and around LaGuardia Corner Gardens recently, theories abounded on where all the birds have gone. Hellmann, snapping on a pair of yellow rubber gloves, asserted that her first sighting of the birdnapper, on Eighth Street, had left her stunned. "I can't judge people, but that a person thinks he has a right to scoop up pigeons--that just drives me crazy," she said. She wanted to put to rest, while she was at it, the stereotypical association of pigeons with breadcrumb-sprinkling elderly women. "That is a made-up concept," she said, rooting around in the dirt for a dead rat. "There are plenty of little old men."