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

Publication: The New Yorker

Publication Date: 03-DEC-07

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COPYRIGHT 2007 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.

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,...

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