Originally Posted by Der Ami
When I was a teenager, about every two years the city would have a pigeon shoot on the Court House square. This was to help control the mess they made everywhere. I haven't seen a pigeon in over 20 years, I don't miss them, but miss the shoots. I guess they learned a different way to control them. I'm pretty sure we didn't shoot them all.
Mike
About 25 yeas ago I had traps set up to catch pigeons in town. Caught about 150 before I got a visit from a city official who was outraged I was catching pigeons and using them for dog training. He just introduced a bill in city counsel to outlaw what I was doing. Knowing it would pass, my city trapping days were over. Funny thing was up until then nobody cared about the pigeons one way or another.

So I pulled my traps to just outside town, which was a decent location but only about half as good as downtown. About two months later my pigeon catching went down to almost zero all of a sudden. I asked a friend, whose roof top had been my earlier trap location, where all the pigeons had gone to. He explained that after I stopped trapping numbers seemed to increase, crap was everywhere and people were complaining, something must be done. So the city put out rat poison which the pigeons eat up like candy. They were dropping dead everywhere for about a month. Numbers went down from 500 to about 20 in a month. Today, 25 years later, you never see pigeons downtown because if they appear out goes the rat poison to knock them down. “We are from the government and here to help” is a scary concept.