Venice officials take on city’s pigeons
Luigi Costantini / Associated Press
RULING THE ROOST: Pigeons swarm around a bird-feed vendor in St. Mark’s Square in 2007. Venetian officials, who have banned bird-feed vendors and anyone else from feeding the birds, say the policy is showing results.
They say the birds, with their poop and pecking, are ruining Italy’s art and architecture and harassing tourists and customers. But some animal activists are flouting a ban on feeding them.
Venice, Italy
The pigeons are hungry. Venetian pirates to the rescue!
A band of animal lovers armed with skull-and-crossbones flags zips over the choppy Venice lagoon in speedboats. They dock at the palace-lined piazza, lug out 20-pound sacks of birdseed and scatter the food for all to eat. Or peck. The pirate pigeon-
saviors have made three lightning raids into St. Mark’s, the first two at the crack of dawn and now, at midday, to deliberately confront the police and their ban on feeding the birds.
So goes Venice’s battle over its ever-multiplying pigeons. “Flying rats,” in the view of the mayor — airborne menaces that poop all over precious, centuries-old marble statues. “Cool,” in the view of many tourists — can you imagine a picture of St. Mark’s without them?
“Overfeeding is a problem because those that are ill and not strong live longer than they should,” Belcaro says from his office overlooking the Grand Canal. “It is no longer a natural thing.”
Once the mighty center of a seafaring empire, Venice has fought off predators for centuries, from invading armies coveting its strategic location and ample wealth, to the rising ocean tides that are slowly engulfing its islands. Modern times brought a new set of threats, including smog, water pollution, hordes of tourists and the pigeons. Officials argue that the pigeons’ highly acidic guano seeps into fissures in thousands of marble monuments and building facades, weakening the structures. In addition, they scratch and peck at the marble, seeking its calcium content as a nutrient, doing further costly damage.
Renata Codello, an official with the Italian Cultural Works Ministry, says the pigeons are destroying Venice’s architectural heritage. The poop, she says, is a biohazard, igniting a chain reaction producing algae, spores and fungus, while the birds are potential carriers of diseases and nasty bugs.
“They treat the pigeons like they were demons,” says Paolo Mocavero, head of the 100% Animalisti organization that conducts the pirate feeding operations. The city’s decade-old practice of using wide nets to capture pigeons is especially objectionable, activists say. “The pigeons suffer a lot,” says Gianpaolo Pamio of the Bird Protection League. “I want to know what the city is doing with the pigeons. Are they going to end up on our plates?”
“It’s sad, but what can we do?” Belcaro says. He dismisses alternatives that activists propose, such as trying to ply the birds with contraceptives. Birth control, which has to be consumed regularly, is difficult to administer efficiently in such a huge, nomadic population, he says.
Even in the first weeks of the birdseed ban policy (pirate feedings aside), Belcaro says, he already sees success in a notable decline in the number of birds congregating in St. Mark’s Square. True, there may be slightly fewer of them, but they seem to be getting a bit more aggressive. After all, food shortages often lead to riots.
Under the porticoes of the creamy Doges’ Palace on a sun-filled late morning in May, one pigeon went after a woman with an apple. She danced and bobbed to get away, screaming, “Let me go! GO AWAY!” Still, most of the waddling bevies of tourists seemed to delight in the pigeons. Americans, Russians and Japanese played the stunt of stretching out arms, then squealing when birds alighted, as friends and family snapped photos. One Spanish-speaking woman had no fewer than 10 pigeons on her arms, shoulders, head and purse. Real Hitchcock material.
“I like the pigeons,” says tourist Hunter Latour, 18, from West Palm Beach, Fla. “It’s part of the experience of coming to Venice and to St. Mark’s, the attraction. Take that away and you lose something.”
“The pigeons are a part of the history of Venice,” vendor Daniela D’Este says. Take away the pigeons, she says, and “it’s like Venice without the gondolas.”