Another Pigeon Story

[TAWhatley]

This story also courtesy of Andi

Terry Whatley
The Pigeon Man, part 1
by Mark McDermott
A few months ago, a customer came into Trader Joe’s in
Redondo’s Riviera Village and alerted the manager on
duty that a pigeon had been badly injured in the
parking lot. She thought a car had run over the bird.
Assistant manager Billy Brandon immediately phoned the
only person he knew would help.
Dr. G.R. Enright, Jr., better known as “Red,” was on
the scene in minutes. The bird was convulsing, the
pupils of its eyes were shrunken to a pinpoint, and
its belly had the telltale bulge of a recent meal. It
had been poisoned, Enright knew instantly, most likely
with a seed mixture containing the chemical Avitrol.
“It’s a very strong nerve poison,” Enright said. “The
birds die of multiple heart attacks. It’s the most
painful death imaginable.”
Enright asked for something sharp, and Brandon
produced a box-cutter. They set up an operating table
right there in the parking lot. Enright opened up the
bird’s crop and cleaned out the poison birdseed with
water, but all to no avail. The bird died of a heart
attack in his hands.
Mean bastards, he thought to himself.
Then he looked out across the parking lot and saw
something strange — a pigeon perched on a car. Pigeons
don’t usually perch on cars, but this pigeon had been
watching the whole operation. It was the dead bird’s
mate. Enright approached the pigeon, and it didn’t
flee as he took hold of its convulsing body. It had
also eaten the poison seed. Enright repeated the
procedure, cleaned out the crop, and patched the bird
up with tape. The pigeon was saved.
Brandon swept the parking lot, but it proved
impossible to get all the seed from the cracks in the
concrete. The next day, as Enright was putting up a
reward poster offering $500 for information about the
poisoning, he noticed a mother sparrow teaching her
two babies how to feed, picking seeds out of the
cracks. He shooed them away, but it was too late.
“Nobody will see those birds ever again,” he sadly
noted.
Avitrol is legal only when used by a licensed
pest-control specialist, and of course never in a
public place where non-targeted species — including
humans — might be exposed. New York City has banned
its use as too dangerous for urban settings, and the
National Humane Society is lobbying for a nationwide
ban.
The management of the shopping plaza said it had
nothing to do with the poisoning. “If you’ve got dying
birds around, it detracts from ambience of the whole
thing,” said the man responsible for maintenance at
the plaza, who did not give his name. “I’m horrified
anyone would do something like this. It’s dangerous
not only to those birds, but to any bird, any dog, or
even kids in the neighborhood. I hope they catch
whoever did it.”
Much of the urban world is, in fact, anti-pigeon. Look
closely at ledges and other potential perching places
in many commercial areas, and you’ll notice rows of
spikes meant to discourage the presence of pigeons and
their droppings. Avitrol is designed for one reason —
to rid places of birds that have become a pestilence,
foremost among them pigeons.
Enright argues the targeting of pigeons is
particularly reprehensible because the birds are “the
descendents of heroes,” a species that for thousands
of years worked as messengers for humanity, before the
advent of electronic communication displaced their
usefulness and they were discarded.
“These pigeons are a man-made bird,” Enright said.
“With selective breeding, we have intentionally bred
fear of humans out of them for thousands of
generations. To take a bird we have intentionally made
totally dependant on us, to turn around and use that
trust to slaughter them, it is unthinkable to me.”
Gone to the birds
Dr. G.R. Enright, Jr., has pursued a diverse array of
endeavors.
He is by profession an electrical engineer, lawyer,
and corporate consultant. But in the course of his
life, a voracious curiosity has lead him to pursue
other interests so avidly they cannot be described as
mere hobbies. He is a sailor practiced at the nearly
lost art of celestial navigation; a balloonist who has
risen to 27,500 feet through the power of hot air
alone; and a licensed pilot who survived a small plane
crash in which he intentionally ran into a power pole
to avoid crashing into a housing tract. He is a stage
magician, an alleged renegade beekeeper (he argued his
own case successfully in court, using a magic trick as
part of his case), and still has hopes of becoming the
inventor of, among other things, better airplanes.
Enright is also a photographer, writer, weaver, and
occasionally an actor (his hoary beard was first grown
when he acted in the Downey Civic Light Opera’s
production of Fiddler on the Roof).
Of late, however, this Renaissance man has concerned
himself mainly with pigeons. He has become friend,
advocate, and protector of a species he believes has
been unfairly maligned.
It began for him one morning a little more than five
years ago when he was returning to his Hollywood
Riviera home after breakfast with a friend in San
Pedro. He noticed a pigeon struggling in the middle of
the road, and after initially driving by, he turned
around and went back to investigate.
“I could see it was still breathing,” he said. “But it
was cold, and its eyes were glossed over. Then I reach
under this bird, and find that it’s sticky wet. I
thought, oh God, and I looked at my hands and they
were clear, there was no blood on them. I could tell
this stuff had familiar smell…it was liquid floor wax.
He had drunk some — you could see it around his mouth
— and he had tried to take a bath in it.”
Enright took the bird home and nursed it back to
health. Its left ankle was swollen, and a veterinarian
prescribed low-grade antibiotics to help fight the
infection. Enright kept the pigeon in a cardboard box
on a table in his living room and fed it scrambled
eggs with a turkey baster. Samson, as Enright named
the bird, made himself quite literally at home: on his
forays around the room, he gathered pens, bits of
paper, and other debris and began decorating his box.
“That’s why pigeons are so much like people,” Enright
said. “They get an area, and that becomes their place.
And they defend it. It becomes almost comical, because
they have no real weapons, no talons or anything.”
After two weeks Samson was in good health and Enright
decided it was time to set the bird free. “He was a
free living pigeon,” he explained. “I was thinking he
must have a mate, a nest, and he needs to get back to
what he was doing.”
He took the bird to a friend’s house with a video
camera, intending to film the bird as it returned to
its wild existence. He placed Samson’s box on a table
in the backyard and opened it, expecting the pigeon to
burst out and fly away. Instead, Samson commenced
cleaning his feathers, then looked up at Enright and
flew out of the box and inside the house. Enright
shoed him outside, said his final goodbye, and went
back inside the house so the bird would know he could
go. “I’m thinking this guy just doesn’t know he’s free
yet,” he said.
Samson hopped up onto a beam, then the roof, then flew
off in the direction where he’d been found, apparently
heading home. A few minutes later there was a loud
“bam!” at the back door. “There he is, back at the
glass door beating at it with his chest and beak. I
open door and he comes inside, and he looked at me
like, ‘What the hell are you doing shutting me out?’
It hit me like a ton of bricks: here is a wild bird
and he has made a conscious decision to return to and
live in captivity. I couldn’t believe it.”
So began Enright’s investigations into pigeon nature,
and his new vocation of pigeon rescue.

[bigbird]

Thanks Terry, that was very enlightening and interesting story.
Perhaps more can be done killing pigeons and other birds using poison.
Carl

[AZWhitefeather]

Thank you Andi for finding this most 'Bittersweet' story & thank you Terry for posting it.
Bittersweet in that such a negative event has become a most positive one.
I will say it again, how wonderful it is to have people like Terry, Helen, Cynthia, Fred, Mary & many others that face horrific events everyday & don't hesitate for a second to do what needs to be done in an attempt to save the life of a 'pigeon'.
I will add yet another to my list of heros, Dr. Enright.
Thank you all.
Cindy

[screamingeagle]

I like hearing pigeon stories. Even the one about the poisoned pigeons was good in that now we know the symptoms and what to do if a bird is poisoned by that stuff. It's a sad story, but will help maybe save the lives of more pigeons.