The Pigeon Police.(The Talk of the Town)(Simcha Felder)(Interview)

Pity the New York City pigeon. He finds a place where natural predators are few, and where bread crumbs--note that stooped woman clutching a plastic bag--are bountiful, and yet his life expectancy is just three to four years, compared with fifteen for his cousins in captivity. So life is short: he stuffs himself before he mistakes an office window for open sky. Or maybe he has the misfortune of needing to relieve himself--perhaps more than once--near a subway stop in the district of the Honorable Simcha Felder, councilman from Brooklyn. Felder steps in the guano--he calls it a "puddle" of excrement--and becomes enraged, commissioning a report from his staff: "Curbing the Pigeon Conundrum." Soon after, Christine Quinn, the City Council Speaker, refers to pigeons as "flying rats." Now there's talk of implementing the report's Recommendation No. 5: "Create Pigeon Czar." The czar's responsibilities would include reducing the food supply, promoting birth control (via oral contraceptives disguised as crumbs), and supervising a pilot program called "dovecoting," which involves confiscating pigeon eggs and replacing them with decoys.

"People ask me, 'You have nothing else to do with your time?' " Councilman Felder said recently, sitting in his office on Broadway, where he had decorated one of the walls with a blown-up photograph of some guano-encrusted pipes at the Lorimer Street stop on the J/M trains, which is evidently a pigeon campground. "I think it's pretty important for people in this city, who work hard and get up early, not to have to succumb to the droppings." (From the report: "When dried droppings get wet, this compound takes on an electric charge and can rust steel.") A well-fed pigeon will produce twenty-five pounds of waste in a year, and there may be more than a million pigeons in New York. Felder favors an outright ban on feeding them in public, and plans to introduce a bill to this effect before Christmas. "If somebody loves a pigeon and wants to have one in their living room, and have it run around and donate its droppings, that's fine," he said. "Do whatever you want." He is also calling for all the city's garbage cans to be capped, so that a little more ingenuity would be required of hungry pigeons. "If they want to eat, they have to get ...