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The Persistence of Pigeons

Shortly after they married my sister and her husband bought an old bungalow in a well-established suburb�one with big old trees�built more than fifty years ago. The community is called Mount Healthy, so dubbed after the deadly influenza epidemic of 1918. It was the only community in the region which did not lose any inhabitants to the disease.

For several years, Debbie and Meredith worked at renovating their old house in their free time. The work seemed to proceed by mere inches, especially when their abilities were slowed by a shoulder injury and a bout of Graves Disease, respectively. It's not easy to strip, sand and refinish hardwood floors while convalescing from serious physical problems. Debbie's joy was genuine when she wrote to announce that they were finally moving into the rooms on their own second floor!

Even after most of the work on the interior of the house was finished, Meredith continued improvements on the outside. These efforts were hampered and�he felt�sabotaged by a large tribe of pigeons that lived in the neighborhood, and behaved as if they owned it. A conference or two with nearby homeowners launched a community effort to locate the roosts and drive the birds out of the neighborhood.

Meredith had long suspected that one of the pigeons' main nesting sites was at his house, based on the large quantity of droppings near the foundation. When he looked, he found an enormous nest in a sheltered area just beneath the peak of his roof. As he stood on the rented ladder�the only way to get one tall enough to reach the nest�he was nearly overcome by what he found:

"It was a huge, untidy nest. Pigeons are awful slobs; filthy birds. When the nesting materials rot from age, they just poop all over them and build more nest on top of that. It was a mass of petrified pigeon droppings, all sizes of feathers, broken eggshells, little skeletons�.�.�.�."

He had to descend to the ground and go get a dust mask and close windows on that side of the house before he could proceed.

Back at the attic story, he pried the nest loose, scraped it into trash bags, sneezing in spite of the dust mask, and got the mess down the ladder at no small peril. Even after removing this nest, which he and most of the neighbors suspected was the pigeons' headquarters, the birds continued to hang around. A couple of weeks later, after much observation and surveillance with eyes up, Meredith located the secondary nest. It was in the deep hollow of a large tree on their lot.

He discussed what to do with Debbie and the neighbors, meeting carefully out of range of falling pigeon excrement. The neighborhood is too densely settled for firearms to be an option. Firecrackers thrown into the hollow might damage the tree, which seemed perfectly healthy except for the big hole, and provided lots of shade. Someone suggested filling the hollow with several aerosol cans worth of foam insulation, and this was deemed the best solution to the problem.

As soon as he could, Meredith bought the foam insulation and mounted his ladder with the cans in a sack and a yardstick to poke into the hollow and roust the birds. When he reached the hollow, he reached deep inside with the stick in a gloved hand and poked.

"Cooo-hoo-hoo," he heard, but no pigeon emerged.

Again, he poked.

"Coo-hoo-hoo-hoo."

He climbed higher on the ladder, got a two-handed grip on the yardstick, and stirred the contents of the hollow.

"Coooo-hoo-hoo-hoo."

He climbed even higher and peered into the hollow. One pigeon occupied the bottom of the space, cocking its head to look up at him. He had brought a flashlight, and used it as well. Satisfied that there were no baby pigeons in the hollow, he uncapped a can of foam insulation and shook it vigorously, then he reached as deeply into the hollow as he could and gave one strong preliminary squirt. He hoped that the foul chemical odor of the stuff would give the bird the incentive it needed to abandon its home.

He retreated a couple of steps down the ladder and waited at least a minute. The bird did not leave.

Meredith gave the prodding yardstick approach one last try. Hands above his head, so his head would not appear to be blocking the exit hole, from the pigeon's point of view, he put the stick back inside the hollow and flailed as hard as he could, in every direction.

"Cooo-hoo-hoo," was all he heard from deep within the tree.

"This is it, pigeon," he warned, and shook the can again.

Feeling a little regret�but not much�he began to fill the hollow in the tree with foam insulation. The stuff hardens fairly quickly after it hits the air. He heard no more cooing and he heard no sounds of struggle.

The tree no longer has a hollow. It continues to grow and shade the house and yard. The pigeons have moved on, and have not tried to resettle the ledge beneath the ridgepole of Debbie and Meredith's roof. I guess they just made that corner of Mount Healthy too hot to hold pigeons any more.

Meredith still thinks about that ill-fated bird in the hollow�about how it probably died from the fumes of reactive plastic before it could suffocate�at least he hopes that's what happened.

"Someday, the tree will die, and maybe, when they cut it down, they'll cut through the foam that fills that old hollow. At the bottom, just above the mess of nesting materials, they'll find a pigeon-shaped hole, like a mold for a casting."�

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