Feral pigeons should be culled not rehomed

On our crowded island, nature has to be managed – and that includes these filthy, pestilential birds

Hungerford in Berkshire is a beautiful town, with perhaps only one flaw: it has too many pigeons. So the local authority has arranged for some of them to go on an avian holiday to the far away coastal town of Whitby. Whitby is another gem of a place, with a ruined abbey and an association with Dracula. The last thing it needs is somebody else’s pigeons – and as for the birds themselves, it would serve Hungerford right if they used their homing capabilities to fly back there again.

It isn’t humane to trap and disorientate a creature by transporting it to a locale it doesn’t recognise. Similarly well-meaning but misguided attempts are made to relocate urban foxes, with the result that dozens of vermin, brought from cities and released in fields, can be seen wandering about, dazed and unable to cope without a ready supply of dustbins to feed from. Why ignore the altogether more straightforward solution to deal with the problem of such pests, which comes from the end of a barrel? And I don’t mean a barrel of beer.

I admit to having a bit of a private war on pigeons. When we moved to our London home many years ago, we had those strips of plastic spikes fitted on every ledge. Over the years they have fallen off, which has allowed the wretched avians to repossess their former haunts – with predictably dire consequences for the garden bench, recently repainted and supplied with new cushions, beneath one of their favourite perches.

These are not like the sleek racing version of the species, popular alike with Her Majesty the Queen and Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront. They’re dull of feather and pestilential. And they do everything they can to provoke me.

Outside my study window is an elbow of drainpipe where a couple of them are routinely to be seen cuddled up, despite every effort of mine to dislodge them. I hear them coming, noisy as helicopters as they flap effortfully in order to keep their fat bodies airborne. Fortunately, I have a novelty pencil a yard long which I can rap on the windowpane, but they aren’t always frightened.

Don’t think that is the only weapon I have in the arsenal. As twilight descends, a sudden flash from the torch on my mobile phone has salutary effects. They flap off, to a roof a few feet away. Invariably they wait, foolishly sussing out the place they’ve just left, before – whirl, flap – returning to it. I rush upstairs, open the window above them and chuck out some water. My theory is that they will come to fear an unexpected threat from overhead. Counter-pigeon methods such as these are only a release valve to stop me blowing up with rage. Offensive cooing will once more be heard outside the window next morning.

In 2000, pigeon haters such as I received support from an unlikely quarter: Ken Livingstone, for all his fondness for newts, wanted to expel the pigeons from Trafalgar Square – or more particularly, the people who sold them food.

This led to a rumpus and the formation of Save the Trafalgar Square pressure group; but pigeon numbers did fall until the scheme was abandoned.

Since then they have gone back up again. Tourists in St James’s Park seem to enjoy being covered in pigeons, ignorant, presumably, of the diseases they spread (histoplasmosis, cryptococcosis and psittacosis, to name three). Coronavirus is a disease that originated in the animal kingdom, before leaping the species barrier. Just saying.

I don’t advocate exterminating all pigeons, and certainly not wood pigeons, despite the toll they take on crops. But they’re like all wild or feral creatures on these small and densely populated islands: some, in their proper place, are okay, possibly delightful – but get an overabundance of anything and it will need to be controlled. Too many protected badgers are disastrous for hedgehogs, whose numbers have plummeted. Seagulls are wonderful when they’re at sea; the semi-domesticated variety which rip open binliners and swoop on children’s fish and chips in seaside towns are revolting. Red squirrels good, grey squirrels bad.

Nature doesn’t exist in its wild state anywhere in Britain. It has to be managed. Pigeons, I do hope your time is up.