Pigeon carcasses pile up downtown.
In children's literature, whenever a couple of curious kids discover a secret door, it usually leads to an enchanted land of delight and wonder.
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But there were no talking lions or mysterious gardens to be found beyond the metal hatch in the basement of Jewel Mark, a jewelry store on San Francisco Street. Instead, shop owners Rita and Michael Linder's 6-year-old granddaughter and her friend discovered a fire escape of feathered carnage and the only world they opened was a bureaucratic labyrinth.
Sometime in the last two months, the building's landlords, Accent Property Management, installed a wire netting across the top of the disused and previously sealed-off fire escape. Ostensibly, the net was meant to keep pigeons out. The problem was the company apparently didn't relocate the pigeons that had already chosen to nest in the fire escape. As a result, the birds have slowly starved or drowned in rainwater that collected in the limited space.
And so, behind the door, the two children found a pool of stagnant water, lumpy with the carcasses of pigeons, chicks and unhatched eggs.
"They came running up the stairs yelling," Rita Linder tells SFR. "I went back there and I was horrified. I mean there were dead pigeons and eggs all over, and probably a foot of pigeon poop."
That was in mid-May and the Linders say they immediately alerted Accent about the trapped pigeons and what they deemed an animal-welfare crisis and a public-health risk. Yet, when SFR inspected the fire escape three weeks later, the problem had not abated. Dead pigeons and broken eggs were still decomposing in a pool of water and trapped birds could be heard fluttering up and down the escape.
Accent did not return SFR's calls, but they might have been only one part of the equation.
The Linders say when they attempted to alert the authorities it became clear no one knows who actually has authority to inspect the mess and enforce a clean-up. SFR, too, experienced a mobius strip of referrals between the City Manager's Office, the County Manager's Office, both the city and county Animal Control divisions, the New Mexico Environment Department and the New Mexico Department of Health.
"I mean, who are we supposed to call with a problem like this?" Michael Linder asks. "The city doesn't know? How stupid is that? I mean, this is a health problem for anybody who works here or lives here. The city has to be concerned about it. Who is responsible?"
The city's Constituent Services manager, Sevastián Gurulé, says neither his office nor the Land Development Office received a complaint from the Linders. However, he says, the city's Animal Control Division does not have the specific legal authority to deal with pigeons on private property. The closest applicable law relates to public nuisances, he says.
"I cannot tell you, 'Yes, we do it. Here's the division that covers it, here are the penalties, here are the citations and here are the staff members that will issue those citations," Gurulé says. "I don't have that. But if it became something that serious in nature, I'm sure our attorney would be looking into what authority we do have."
In the meantime, the Department of Health says the situation shouldn't pose a significant health risk as long as individuals don't drink the dead-pigeon water.
Fortunately, the wild pigeon chase seems to be coming to an end. After learning of SFR's inquiries on this story, Accent signed a contract on June 2 with Loving Animal Services, a humane trap-and-release firm that will handle the remaining birds and re-construct the wire netting.
So far, according to witnesses, they have pulled out 12 corpses and rescued two live birds.