Pigeon Wars

For 10 days this August,a fresh-faced 41-year-old named Jeffrey Traill trolled Hollywood in his Honda, videotaping pigeons. Pigeons lined the ArcLight theaters near the Walk of Fame, commandeered the roof at Big Lots!, perched along power lines like stolid chess pieces. “Pigeons,” Traill says in his video, shakily framing one roost. “Pigeons,” he says again, wrenching his camera toward another. The effect is nauseating. “Over there,” he says. “Over there. Over there.”
Traill is one of a half-dozen neighborhood activists whose volunteer campaign against these birds has escalated idiosyncratically for more than a year. Their leader, Laura Dodson, had ordered him out on yet another round of surveillance, to update the group’s hulking pigeon “dossier.” “We’re kind of an unusual neighborhood association,” Dodson told me.

Dodson has lived in Hollywood for 29 years. She likes pigeons and does not want them killed or made to suffer. She said this repeatedly in the clipped, mildly truculent way she says a lot of things. But