Bird trouble in Hollywood

This CNN.com article, "Women battle over dirty birds," made me laugh and sigh. On one side, Laura Dodson wants to reduce the amount of guano deposited by Rock Pigeons around Hollywood. The article says guano can corrode metal; I had no idea.

On the other side, Susie Kourinian dumps 25-lb. bags of seed at various locations around Tinseltown. "Kourinian once told police she spends $65,000 a year on bird feed -- enough to dump 500 pounds of birdseed every day, a lifeline for the more than 5,000 pigeons who now populate the two square miles of this neighborhood northwest of downtown Los Angeles."

From the article:

Stephanie Boyles, a wildlife biologist with the Humane Society who has developed pigeon control programs around the country, said she's never seen anything like it. To get a sense of how bad the problem was, she once scattered some bread in a Hollywood parking lot.

Within moments, the bread was gone and thousands of eyes were upon her. An eerie cooing suggested they wanted more.

"I've traveled in Europe, I've been to New York City many, many times, Washington D.C. and Chicago ... places that claim to have pigeon problems. They do, but compared to Hollywood, it's not even a fair comparison," Boyles said.

Dodson's efforts now include avian birth control: Ovocontrol P. It seems to be working and reducing the pigeon population -- and the amount of guano.

Pigeons and humans recognize objects with a similar technique

Who woulda thunk?

DURHAM, N.H. -- Pigeons and humans use similar visual cues to identify objects, a finding that could have promising implications in the development of novel technologies, according to new research conducted by a University of New Hampshire professor.

Brett Gibson, an assistant professor of psychology who studies animal behavior, details his latest research in the journal article, “Non-accidental properties underlie shape recognition in mammalian and non-mammalian vision,” published [Wednesday] in Current Biology. Gibson and his colleagues found that humans and pigeons, which have different visual systems, have evolved to use similar techniques and information to recognize objects.


“Understanding how avian visual systems solve problems that require considerable computational prowess may lead to future technological advances, such as small visual prosthetics for the visually impaired, in the same way that understanding visual processing in honeybees has led to the development of flying robots and unmanned helicopters,” the researchers say.

Gibson's also studied navigation and memory in birds. He's currently investigating how Clark’s Nutcracker uses different types of spatial information to find food caches during winter.

Photo courtesy of University of New Hampshire