This nest is needling people
In a testament to the sheer scale and concentration of Vancouver’s drug problem, a pigeon living in the city’s Downtown Eastside was found to have built its nest entirely out of used hypodermic needles.
At least that was the theory of police.
“Sad reality of the opioid crisis,” wrote Vancouver Police Supt. Michelle Davey, a veteran of policing strategies and planning in the neighbourhood, that accompanied a picture of the “nest.”
But experts are now questioning whether the structure was truly built by the birds.
Luc-Alain Giraldeau, dean of the Faculty of Science at l’Université du Québec à Montréal — and a pigeon expert — pointed out three problems with the nest.
First, it contains three eggs when the typical pigeon will only lay a clutch of two. It also lacks a thick coat of pigeon feces that are typically used to incubate eggs. And finally, pigeon nests are “always constructed on a flat surface.”
“This cannot be a pigeon nest,” wrote Giraldeau in an email to the National Post.
A similar verdict came from Marion Chatelain, a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Warsaw specializing in the urbanization of wildlife.
“To the best of my knowledge, feral pigeons do not use human wastes to build their nest,” she wrote in an email to the National Post.
Chatelain similarly noted the peculiarity of a pigeon nest holding a clutch of three — rather than two — eggs.
However, two sources contacted by the National Post suspected that it could be the work of pigeons.
Bobby Corrigan, a renowned New York City pest control researcher, told the National Post it was “definitely a possibility.”
“Pigeons are always collecting an assortment of sticks and anything that is stick-shaped for their crude nests,” he said.
Nathaniel Wheelwright, a veteran bird biologist at Maine’s Bowdoin College, called it unusual but possible.
“My first reaction was that it looks faked,” he said. “But then pigeons do build flimsy platform nests of thick twigs, and house wrens sometimes nest in bags of nails. So, it could be.”
The structure — which presumably could have been built by anybody with access to pigeon eggs and used needles — was spotted by the police department’s homeless outreach coordinator during a search of a vacant room in a “singleroom occupancy,” the official term for low-cost hotels frequented by addicts in the Downtown Eastside.