Connections: Bye, Bye, Birdie
It was the early 1980s and everyone at The Star was fed up with the pigeons that perched and nested and chattered on the ledge that runs above the plate-glass windows at the front of the building. The pigeons made a lot of noise and left droppings all over the sidewalk (and, sometimes, all over the heads of customers). They were such a nuisance that we wanted to rid ourselves of them about as much as some people, these days, want to be rid of deer.
Where have all the East Hampton pigeons gone? No one seems to remember quite when they left. One day they were just gone, and we hardly noticed.
My son Dave reminds me that, back in the day, the pigeons sometimes were poked at with long bamboo sticks, in an attempt to annoy them from their roost, but it didn’t go any good. We hung a fake owl above the ledge, to scare them, but they paid it no mind. I remember someone (I can’t remember who) got so irritated that he climbed up and snatched a pigeon nest from one of the ledge’s corners, mumbling he was going to transfer it to safety elsewhere.
Robbing birds’ nests is hardly a civilized pastime. But the mess the pigeons made — not only on the sidewalk in front of the building but on the tiled outdoor step into it — was really a problem. I knew I would be held responsible if someone slipped and fell.
At the time, pigeons were all over the village business district. One shop owner had installed a fearfully loud, automatic clapper device on the roof of a Newtown Lane building to chase them away. I think it might have been Parsons Electric (headquartered where Scoop is today). At any rate, I decided to get a clapper for The Star, too.
The noise of this electric clapper — and its intermittent timing — drove everyone in the neighborhood nuts. We had no year-round neighbors, but we got complaints. And it didn’t even work.
Thinking of our onetime pigeon problem, and the mystery of the birds’ curious disappearance, I went up to the attic this morning to see if I could unearth the famous clapper, but it was nowhere to be found. The man from Riverhead who installed it probably took it back when we and our neighbors had had enough.
Looking for answers, I phoned Larry Penny, our nature writer, who has an encyclopedic mind when it comes to the flora and fauna of Long Island. Uncharacteristically, he was stymied for a while. Then, he called back with a theory. A Southern crow, the fish crow, which is a bit smaller than the indigenous American crow, has established itself here, especially in the village, “in a big way,” he said. And, he added, “They are nest-stealers.”
Hm. Wouldn’t it be nice — after all the sturm und drang about contraception, and culling, and spaying — if our problem deer would just quietly disappear into the night like the pigeons? I wonder what nonindigenous and less-troublesome animal we might import to nest in their place? Do llamas eat garden flowers? Do koalas carry ticks?