Dave Roth brought a friend to the New Times offices, a demure little pigeon he calls Tootsie. He set her on a desk and she strutted around, nodding her head as if in agreement with Roth's thoughts about pigeon control at the Madison Street Jail.
Roth has started a heated debate with county authorities over whether pigeons should be trapped and/or killed as the county suggests, or if the jail's structure should be altered to keep the pigeons from nesting there. Roth has meticulously gathered facts and figures claiming that it would be far less expensive and far more effective to rig the building with wire or fabric netting especially designed to keep birds out. They seem to not want to hear him.
"Could this be an example of why the county is in debt?" he asks.
Roth's a dark, bearded man with eyebrows that flex and fly so vigorously to punctuate his remarks that they sometimes threaten to leave his face altogether. He was once a firefighter, once owned a pair of sporting-goods stores, and now supports himself working odd jobs to devote most of his time to the Urban Wildlife Society, which is more an animal-rights concept than an organization. In fact, it's a society of one, though "if I need a show of bodies, I can get 40, 50, 100 people to support the cause pretty quickly."
He assiduously researches the birds--which he calls "rock doves"--and disseminates his information as a newsletter to anyone interested, consults on pigeon problems, and lobbies the county.
"Like everyone else, I was a former pigeon abuser," he says. He would shoot them off his air conditioner with a pellet gun. Then in 1989 he had a pigeonly epiphany. "One decided to adopt me, and I'm trying to atone for my errors."
He keeps several as pets; Tootsie is one of them. She walks over to him affectionately so that he'll rub and ruffle the feathers on the back of her head, then in her delight, she leaves a deposit on the desk.
Pigeon poop is the problem at the Madison Street Jail. With its horizontal gunslot windows and giant louvers that conceal, among other things, the prisoners' exercise area, the jail looks like a ten-story air conditioner, alive with lint. Birds poke in and out of the louvers and cling to the window ledges, dozens at a time, following the sun and the shade from the north to the south sides of the building. Every fiscal quarter, when workmen go behind the louvers to clean, they find a three-inch-deep layer of excrement. Every day, according to assistant county manager Jack Shomenta, janitors mop the front steps. He estimates it costs the county about $20,000 per year, essentially a full-time salary, just to clean up droppings.
On December 13, the county announced that it would invest $9,800 to install poison perches and kill the birds. There was such an immediate uproar that the county set up a pigeon hotline that received 2,000 calls, ranging from hard-core bunny huggers to people screaming that pigeons were just flying rats and should all be killed. Shomenta, for one, was surprised that so many people could get that worked up over pigeons.
Dave Roth staged a "Save the Pigeons" demonstration outside the central court building; 40 people picketed. And he organized a "Pigeon Coalition" that includes members from the ASPCA, from bird and animal rehabilitation shelters, and from other Valley animal-rights organizations.
Then when state and federal wildlife agencies warned that poisoned perches could also kill protected bird species such as peregrine falcons that turn up downtown, the county changed course.
On February 22, Roth and coalition members, along with Robert Ohmart, a professor of zoology at ASU's Center for Environmental Studies, met with county officials. The new plan was to trap and either release or, more likely, euthanize the birds.
"We don't know for sure, but we think it will run between $10,000 and $15,000 the first year," said Bob Gagen, who was then director of facilities management for the county.
"You'll spend that on Phenobarbital alone," to kill the birds, let alone trap them, retorted Treva Sloat of the ASPCA.
Roth and the pigeon coalition want the county to install netting that would keep the pigeons out altogether. Then they would be forced to go elsewhere. He taped the meeting so that he could hold the county to its pronouncements. He had visual aids to convince the county officials that pigeons are not filthy "rats with wings." As Robert Ohmart recalls, "Dave brought a pigeon and let it walk around on the table, and it was friendly and it pooped on some papers. And he tried to get them to cuddle it. And I'm sure they viewed him as somewhat of a pigeon-hugger nut-type. I left feeling it was a done deal. They're going to trap pigeons."
Leave aside, for a moment, Roth's truly odd affection for a bird that most people don't want to touch. He's got a strong financial argument for taking the humanitarian approach to the jail's pigeon problem, as well.
Shomenta has pointed out that to install specially designed bird-proof metal netting on the north and south sides of the jail building would cost $28,000. It would be a permanent measure. If it costs $10,000 to $15,000 to trap and euthanize the birds per year, simple arithmetic says that the cost of netting would be recovered in two to three years, not to mention the cost of the daily cleanup man.
