California baseball fans, players have common enemy: gulls
SAN FRANCISCO — Like any player, San Francisco Giants outfielder Denard Span worries about hitting nasty curveballs and losing fly balls in the sun. But he’s got another concern when he’s playing at his home stadium: birds pooping on him in the field.
“I’m afraid of them dropping something, using the bathroom on top of me,” Span said. “Or maybe them dropping some food near me and then all of them just freaking swarming me.”
It’s a possibility, considering how regularly flocks of gulls come in off the San Francisco Bay to hover low over the Giants’ AT&T Park.
Sports venues across the country struggle to wave off pigeons, bats and gulls, but the two Bay Area ballparks’ proximity to the water and dumps attracts birds in large flocks. It has been such a problem at the Oakland Coliseum that stadium operations officials added a pair of vinyl kites this season in an effort to fend them off.
Gulls typically feed at dumps, but marine biologists say recent efforts taken by some nearby sites to bury the waste faster have kept the feathered creatures away. Now, the gulls circle Bay Area ballparks in the hundreds to scour for leftovers such as those popular garlic fries, creating a nuisance for fans and players - not to mention the grounds crew that goes back to work on the infield, basepaths and mound the moment a game ends.
That prompted the two teams to ex-
periment with unconventional measures of dealing with their respective bird business.
In Oakland, the bird brigade was becoming such a problem that the Athletics added two falcon-shaped kites this season to try to scare off the gulls. The kites even have catchy nicknames chosen by fans: “Falcon McFalconface” and “Scott Hattebird,” after former A’s star Scott Hatteberg.
“We took off the tarps in the third deck for the first time in several years, so it seemed to open up the opportunity for the birds to come,” said David Rinetti, the A’s vice president of stadium operations.
There were a few day games this season when more than 300 gulls circled in and around the ballpark. Players and fans noticed, complaining the birds were making a mess. So Rinetti and his staff needed a solution - and fast.
“I looked up ‘bird abatement, Bay Area’ online and came up with a company that provided these kites that are falcons that supposedly worked to keep seagulls away,” Rinetti said.