Free as a Bird

WHEN I MOVED into a new apartment on the 21st floor of a highrise last year, just a few nights in, I realised several parts of the house were already under occupation. On the ledges outside the windows where air-conditioners are placed, on the hidden spaces between my apartment and the one above, and in the shafts, entire families of pigeons roosted. They uttered deep guttural hoots through the night, and their chicks chirped through the day. They would fill my window sill with their feathers and cake my windows with their excreta. They would swoop down to the garden to drink their fill from the building’s swimming pool, and fly to the road where people threw them grains. When my windows were left open, they would try to roost in my cupboards and peck out holes into the fruits on my table. They would occasionally break into my bathroom, and once, even laid an egg on an empty soap case.

A lifetime spent living in the lower floors of buildings had left me underprepared. Pigeons have the capacity to roost everywhere. But they appear to have a special fondness for the ledge of taller buildings, perhaps because of the absence of predators like cats. Looking up solutions online, I purchased the scarecrow of a hawk that is meant to scare away pigeons and placed it on one ledge, and later, tied old CDs to the grills of my windows, the bright side facing upwards to blind the pigeons. These appeared to work for a few days, until I had to retrieve them, from the rest of the rubbish on the ledge the pigeons had thrown in.

Like everyone else, I just had to learn to live with the problem.

The pigeon that we find in our streets (or shafts) is really a dove, or more precisely a rock dove (Columba livia, formally). Historically, across spiritual traditions and cultures, pigeons have exercised a strong grip on our imaginations. They have been worshipped as fertility goddesses and revered as symbols of peace. It was the white dove or pigeon, for instance, that returned to Noah with an olive branch. Researchers believe that the pigeon was among the earliest species to be domesticated, right after the dog. They flocked to the first farms in the Fertile Crescent in the Middle East, and their domestication happened soon after. We bred them for food, and later to carry messages, and simply for pleasure. In India, the Mughals were known to be particularly fond of breeding pigeons and Akbar is said to have had a large hood numbering more than 10,000 pigeons of various breeds.

According to Ashwin Viswanathan, a researcher at Bird Count India, the pigeons we find today are descendants of domesticated pigeons and wild rock doves. Although tiny numbers of individuals still breed pigeons, largely, pigeons have outlasted their use. But, even as the numbers of most birds dwindle, theirs continue to explode. Two years ago, when a team of researchers from different groups published a report titled ‘State of India’s Birds’, where they had tracked around 867 Indian birds over 25 years, they found that while most birds had suffered a decline in numbers, pigeon numbers have risen by nearly 150 per cent since the turn of the century. “There is evidence that shows the real exponential growth has happened in the last 30 to 40 years,” says Viswanathan, who was one of the researchers in this group. “Their numbers are already so high that their growth every year is phenomenal. Any urban area not completely colonised by pigeons is increasingly being colonised. Newer pigeons are constantly moving in.”

Pigeons thrive in urban areas because there is plenty of food available and predators are near absent. They are also known to be ferocious breeders, researchers point out, laying as many as three eggs around five or six times every year. The nooks and crannies and ledges our buildings provide also serve as a close approximation to the cliffs and hills their ancestors inhabited.

“They have become a menace,” says Amit Christian, the proprietor of the Vadodara-based Pigeon Control India, whose firm provides solutions in the forms of nets and spikes to keep out pigeons across the country. “Even about 15 years ago, people didn’t mind them much. But now, their numbers have gone out of hand,” he says.

Christian’s “pigeon-proofing” business, started in 2011, executes large contracts. Some of the clientele comprises housing societies, but the vast majority are those that run public spaces like airports, railway stations and commercial establishments that maintain large factories. “Many of my clients run factories that supply products abroad. What was happening was their products were getting rejected because it was found contaminated with something. When they checked later, they found there were pigeons roosting in the factories and their droppings were contaminating the products,” he says. Something similar occurred a few years ago when products of a popular Indian spice brand tested positive for salmonella and were recalled from stores in California. According to some reports, the source of contamination was probably pigeons in a factory they maintained in India.

AN OVERABUNDANCE OF pigeons is also ruining heritage structures and monuments, and according to some doctors, can even lead to ailments and respiratory issues in humans. In 2020, the IIT Delhi-incubated startup Clensta which works in the personal hygiene space developed a pigeon-repellent spray. The trick, Ankita Arora, the head of the research and development wing of the firm, says is in masking the odour of the pigeon’s excreta. “What we found out was that pigeons keep returning to the same old spot, and they navigate back by following the odour of their excreta,” she says. “So, what we did is we came out with a spray containing essential oils that you keep spraying at such a spot so that they get confused.”

Pigeons thrive in urban areas because there is plenty of food available and predators are near absent. They are also known to be ferocious breeders, laying as many as three eggs around five or six times every year. The nooks and crannies and ledges our buildings provide also serve as a close approximation to the cliffs and hills their ancestors inhabited

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For over a year, Arora and a group of researchers would move through the IIT-Delhi campus, seeking out places that attracted the most pigeons, from parking lots to various floors at buildings, to perfect the composition of the ingredients and try it out in the real world. The spray, according to the firm’s founder Puneet Gupta, is its most popular product. So far, it is mostly used in homes, and spaces like hotels and hospitals. He is now trying to push for its use at heritage structures, and has even reached out to the authorities at the Indira Paryavaran Bhawan in Delhi, which last year, besieged with the issue of pigeons dirtying the courtyard, had invited proposals seeking a remedy.

One of the larger dangers posed by the unchecked growth of pigeons is to aircraft. “Bird hits are one of the biggest problems for airports,” says BK Srivastava, an aviation consultant who worked with the Airports Authority of India (AAI) and served as the director for several airports in India. “Once in the air, when a bird hit happens, it can lead to anything, from fatalities to damages to the craft.” The numbers of reported bird hits have spiked over the years, as much a reflection of how busy our airports have become as the explosion in the pigeon population. In 2016, there were 839 instances of wildlife strikes (which are made up primarily of bird hits), according to reports of statistics shared by the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) and AAI. This has risen steadily over the years, and in 2021, even while fewer flights operated that year compared to 2016 owing to the pandemic, the number of strikes had risen to 1,453.

While different birds collide with aircraft, pigeons are believed to make up the largest numbers. The collisions become most scary, Srivastava says, when birds are sucked into an engine or the collision happens with a window or windscreen that could cause a crack. Airports deal with this issue by having teams of bird chasers who scare away birds using firecrackers or devices that emit sounds. They design the airport in a way that makes it uninviting to birds, Srivastava says, and even employ devices that can be controlled like drones and are shaped like predatory birds to scare away birds. “But these are only efforts at minimising the risk,” he says. A few years ago, a Mumbai airport official told me that one of the big reasons for bird strikes was the inability of the municipal corporation in dealing with the issue of garbage that is thrown in the slums near the airport.

The pigeon population isn’t of course only an Indian problem. They have overwhelmed cities all over, and many have responded by instituting bans on feeding, using predatory birds like falcons and hawks to scare them away, and some have even experimented by mixing contraceptives in their feed to check their numbers. In India, however, authorities have been incoherent in their approaches. Occasionally, bans on feeding have been introduced but overturned when opposed by activists. In Mumbai, some in the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation considered using contraceptives in bird feed but did not take the proposal forward. Occasionally, some cities like Hyderabad in 2019, have captured pigeons where they roost in large numbers and released them outside the city.

WHAT COMPLICATES MATTERS here is the feeding of birds by many for spiritual reasons. Disputes now commonly arise in neighbourhoods between those who revile pigeons for the filth they create and those who view feeding as a religious necessity. In Mumbai, such a disagreement between a family that fed pigeons on a metal platform outside a window of their 14th-floor apartment in Worli and the residents that suffered the consequence four floors below, played out for nearly a decade in various levels of the judiciary, from the civil court to the Bombay High Court to finally the Supreme Court, which in 2019 put an end to the matter by refusing to interfere with an earlier order restraining the Thakores (Jigeesha and Padma) from feeding the birds.

Elsewhere in Mumbai’s Khar area, the 92-year-old Anandini Thakoor, an active member of residents’ associations, got caught up, along with a few others, in a bitter feud with those who ran a kabutarkhana. This spot in a busy area of Khar had been acquired by a trust to beautify it but had instead converted it into a feeding spot for pigeons. It came up sometime in the early 2000s, and Thakoor and a few others had been protesting its presence for over 15 years. “It was a nuisance. A lot of people began to develop respiratory issues because of the huge numbers of birds. People would slip because of the excreta, and driving through this area was a nightmare,” she says.

The spot became a hotbed of activity. Local tabloids frequently reported on the dispute. The spot itself was sealed after complaints. But even while the trust that ran the kabutarkhana took the municipal body to court, it would have local ruffians, Thakoor says, remove the seal. She and a few others then formed a group to keep a vigil on the spot, and even employed a guard for the purpose. Finally, a few months back, a civil court ruled against the trust and the kabutarkhana was demolished. Similar disputes are arising at other spots in Mumbai, and various resident associations have begun to reach out to Thakoor for advice.

Back at my house, after my failed attempts, taking the advice of a maid, I began to tie multiple trash bags to the grilles of my window. It isn’t entirely successful. I can still hear them and see their occasional work on my window panes. But this despairing sight of multiple bags fluttering in the air, and the rustling sound it generates, appear to be keeping some of them away. Sometimes.

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Lhendup G Bhutia

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