To Clean Up Subway Station, an Unlikely Tool: Bird Calls

To Clean Up Subway Station, an Unlikely Tool: Bird Calls

Posted on April 25, 2012 by Terri Anne Meyer in Articles

Bird-B-Gone's Bird Chase Super Sonic unit was chosen to shoo birds from a NY Subway station
Article shared from: The NY Times
Librado Romero/The New York Times
Written by: CHRISTINE HAUGHNEY
Published: March 18, 2012

Considering the setting, the sound is difficult to place: a song of the wild, evoking, perhaps, a disturbed rooster accompanied by a small chirping bird.

Every few minutes, the noises resume, an unlikely soundtrack at the entrance to Roosevelt Island subway station.

The bird calls come courtesy of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, but the recorded sound is not the latest example of an underground art or music project. It is actually a weapon against trespassing pigeons.

The authority has had a problem with pigeons entering the station, and leaving their feathers, and more unsightly evidence, on and under the walls. The agency had used netting, similar to chicken wire, beneath the ceiling to try to keep the pigeons at bay.

But in early December, the authority tried a different tack: a $375 bird call system that releases distress and predator calls every 2 to 10 minutes. Since then, authority officials have focused on cleaning up the station and the negative memories many riders still hold of the unsightly entrance.

There were feathers everywhere and there was a lot of poop, Hugo Jaiguay, a 15-year-old Roosevelt Island resident, said as he sat in the station on a recent afternoon waiting for a local bus. It got cleaner when they took out the wires. Its fresher.

Agency officials seemed pleased with the speaker system, designed by Bird-B-Gone, a company based in California. Kevin Ortiz, a Metropolitan Transportation Authority spokesman, said it had installed a similar system in the Pelham Bay Park Station in the Bronx but removed it after customers complained about the sound.

The authority decided to try the system on Roosevelt Island because its previous efforts did little to stem the number of complaints about pigeons and their droppings.

The agency chose the sound system, which Bird-B-Gone calls the bird chase super sonic system, over bird spikes or electric shock systems because it best fit the stations architecture and it works in large open spaces.

Mr. Ortiz added that since the installation of the sound system, there is a noticeable decrease in birds and droppings.

According to Bird-B-Gone's Web site, the company has advised the New York Yankees and the New York State Department of Transportation on their bird-control problems. An expert ornithologist who advises Bird-B-Gone runs a blog on the company's Web site, offering solutions to various bird issues, like what to do when turkeys peck at a glass office building (shoo them off with a sprinkler system, called a scarecrow) and how best to remove roosting birds from an abandoned aircraft hangar (seal it up).

READ THE COMPLETE ARTICLE FROM THE NY TIMES HERE