Why I Shoot Pigeons with an Assault Weapon
Yeah, that’s right. I shoot pigeons with my assault weapon. Hardly a day goes by when I don’t blast one off my windowsill.
Pigeons are lovely creatures. Under normal circumstances I would not wish to shoot them. Their coloration — a mix of soothing grey, dark blue, and iridescent green, with those sweet pink feet — is soothing to the eye. They are not predator birds, like the noble bald eagle. They are more peaceable birds, subsisting on garbage and worms.
The bone I have to pick with them is that by the magic alchemy of their avian digestive tracts, hidden under those soothing grey, dark blue, and iridescent green feathers, they transmute those ingredients into pigeon shit. Which they then deposit upon my air conditioner and windowsill.
Pigeons like a safe secure place to roost and they have found one outside my livingroom window. Were they not defecating like there’s no tomorrow, I would not have a problem with that. It isn’t the pigeons, really, with which I have a problem. It’s the pigeon shit, the feces that carry:
Cryptococcosis: A fungal infection that attacks the lungs. Symptoms include headache, fever, neck pain, nausea, vomiting, sensitivity to light, confusion, or changes in behavior.
Histoplasmosis: Another fungal-lung infection. Symptoms include fever, chills, headache, muscle aches, dry cough, chest pain, or tiredness.
Psittacosis: This bacteria-borne infection causes fever and chills, headache, muscle aches, and dry cough.
While these diseases are not fatal to healthy people, my apartment is occupied by two seniors, one of whom has a compromised immune system. It is not hard to imagine how they would harm someone in poor health. Our policy toward funguses and bacteria that attack our lungs is to avoid them. But we have little choice in the matter when pigeons are shitting on our windowsill day after day.
Perhaps the pigeons are not aware that when they shit on our windowsill, their feces dry up and become airborne. Therefore we cannot open the largest window in our apartment, even though we paid for an air-conditioner mount that would allow us to do so.
And we must keep the intake valve on the AC permanently shut. It operates more efficiently that way, but we are still concerned about airborne pigeon-poop powder getting into the side-mounted vents — and into the windows on either side, which we have open eleven months out of the year. The windows of our courtyard are cloudy with a layer of dried pigeon poop powder. Trust me, that stuff gets around.
The pigeons’ delicate pink feet have also clawed a huge hole into the magnetic foam-rubber pad sitting on top of the AC. Its purpose is to damp the sound of rain hitting the top, every drop like a rifle shot. Before I installed the pad, a heavy rainfall would sound like a war going on.
The pad works. But it is working a little less well as the hole has enlarged. I expect this situation to continue worsening though I am doing what I can to slow the deterioration — with my assault weapon, ladies and gentlemen.
Since my bedroom window is at a right angle to my livingroom window, I have a front-row seat to the pigeon-shitting spectacle. Even when the pigeons are not actually roosting on and below my AC, their little gifts are all too visible. These include not only their feces, but their feathers, which have a magical way of blending with the shit to form a substance that is implacably solid — even the most torrential rain cannot wash it away, especially on top of the AC, where it has bonded to the foam-rubber pad.
So I have done the only thing a man can do. I have exercised my Second Amendment rights and bought an assault weapon. Whenever I see a pigeon shitting on my air conditioner, I open the bedroom window — at a right angle to the livingroom window, as you’ll recall — and I blast those motherfuckers to kingdom come.
There are legal and practical repercussions to this. Bullets might shatter the window, ding the metal window frame, pock the AC, or blast chips off the concrete windowsill. I revere my aged building, erected in 1914. She is a grand dame with high ceilings and stained-glass windows in the lobby and she deserves better treatment.
So I don’t fire lead. I fire two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen. In short, I squirt them with water.
My assault weapon is a pool toy.
It is not the neon lime green pictured in the retail listing. When UPS brought it, it turned out to be neon orange. It is twenty inches long, its barrels two inches wide and six inches in diameter.
You might assume that as a semi-retired person, I have nothing better to do than watch for pigeons to shoot with my trusty weapon. Actually, they call attention to themselves with their cooing. It is not an unpleasant sound, but it is a harbinger of something unpleasant, so it has become a trigger.
Since the pigeons are just smart enough to know what is about to happen when my bright orange assault weapon pokes its snout out the bedroom window, why do they continue signaling their presence with sound? The cooing is a form of communication, in particular a mating call.
The spot under the AC is a sheltered location ideal for sex. Often have I seen two pigeons together there. Even the prospect of being drenched, apparently, does not deter a horny pigeon.
Incidentally, pigeons don’t have genitalia. They have cloacal openings used for mating, laying eggs, and of course for urinating and defecating — which is really the problem, of course. I would love to hear the coo of a male pigeon and think: “Ah, the mating call. Soon two pigeons will unite in a cloacal kiss.”
But they use these same orifices to foul my windowsill. So when I hear their trilling come-hithers, I reach for my gun.
I run water into the bathtub, and pull the two handles apart to fill my pigeon blaster’s barrels. I then raise the window, pull aside its retracting screen, steady the twin barrels on the window frame, and take aim. The watery blast can travel several feet.
Typically I aim below the AC, the sheltered spot they seem to favor for mating. But I’ll blast them off the top of the AC if that’s where they’re roosting at the moment. Judging from the feces and feathers and blends thereof, they seem to spend time in both places.
More often than not they feel my wet fury. However, they are fast, and they are not as dumb as they look, so typically they have unfolded their wings and are about to depart when the water hits them, getting more droplets than gush.
I’ve considered filling my assault weapon with things other than cold water from the tub. Filling from the toilet would be faster, because I wouldn’t have to run water, but even if the water were fairly clean — we do flush, we are not barbarians — I don’t feel comfortable with even slightly contaminated water running down the side of the building or hitting the courtyard below.
I’ve also considered using hot water, but it would take awhile for the water to get hot enough to scald, and I don’t want to harm the birds. I just want to stop them from shitting feces, funguses, and bacteria onto my windowsill and AC.
In very cold weather, the water might freeze and chill the birds. But that would require a strong head-on gush and they’re too fast to receive one. Frankly, after looking at the piles of feces seven days a week, if I saw a frozen pigeon lying in the courtyard, encased in an ice overcoat, and perhaps twitching slightly, I would feel no more than a minor tinge of regret.
Up to now you may have assumed that this is a very localized problem — one man’s lonely battle against a few feathered defecators. But every time I get on the subway, I pass the old station house at Broadway and West 96th Street, across the street from the new station house and plaza. There I see hundreds of pigeons. Seriously. Hundreds, not dozens.
When I first emerged from my covid pandemic induced funk I was amazed and even slightly moved by this spectacle. I wondered how I had lived in the neighborhood for more than four decades without noticing. Then one day I saw a guy standing amid them throwing handfuls of seed corn and thought oh, no.
People are feeding them. An act of misguided kindness is fueling the slow-motion tsunami of disease-causing feces being deposited onto my windowsill and my top-of-the-line Friedrich Kuhl.
I wonder if the man throwing the corn understands that he is not only feeding the pigeons. He is feeding funguses, bacteria, and disease.
I was telling a friend about this, as we sat in the park outside my building, looking up at it, and he got all excited. His response was: “Winged rats. That’s what they are.”
This is exactly how I now think of pigeons: as winged rats. They are vermin. They are also God’s creatures, as am I, if you are a believer, and if you’re not, you still might argue that have as much right to breathe the air as I do. But I assert my moral and ethical right not to breathe air laden with disease-causing bacteria and funguses.
Just as New York needs to control its increasingly large population of increasingly obese rats, it also needs to control its increasingly large population of gastrointestinally aggressive pigeons. With or without wings, we need fewer vermin.
Every so often I like to get out to Jackson Heights, to feast on the buffet offered by a local Indian restaurant. A highlight of the buffet, I long felt, was the squab. That’s four-month-old pigeon. Given pride of place in the center of the buffet, and spiced to a fare-thee-well, it was succulent and delicious. I was disappointed when it disappeared.
Perhaps it’ll be back on the menu soon.
