Vegas bets on new birth-control option for pigeons

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LAS VEGAS - Birth-control pills are often hailed as a key to the women's liberation movement. Now, parks workers in Nevada's Clark County -- home to Las Vegas -- are hoping the same approach will free them from constantly cleaning up after pigeons.

The theory is that Southern Nevada has a worse pigeon problem these days than most other places because its climate allows them to breed year-round and because the thousands of foreclosed homes in the valley have become roosting sites.

"When the homes are vacant and quiet, it's the perfect setting for nesting," says Michael Gardner, who founded his Pigeons Be Gone business in 1998.

Nephi Oliva, who operates Nevada Pigeon Control in North Las Vegas, estimates Las Vegas Valley has about 750,000 pigeons.

The county, in coming weeks, will feed the birds a birth-control drug.

"It's guaranteed to reduce the population 53 percent in a year, 86 percent after 28 months," says county parks maintenance chief Kevin Parker, citing numbers from a California bird-birth-control-drug salesman.

The drug, marketed as OvoControl P, contains nicarbazin, a chemical used since 1955 to treat intestinal parasites in broiler chickens. Through a biochemical process not entirely understood, the drug also reduces the number of successful egg hatchings.

The drug's entry into the realm of pigeon control, made more acceptable by the Environmental Protection Agency's decision in May to remove a "restricted-use" classification for OvoControl P, has resulted in few complaints, and some praise, from animal and wildlife groups.

The Humane Society of the United States commended the EPA decision as a way to control pigeon populations "humanely and effectively." People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals has also supported use of the drug.

For the drug to work, birds need to ingest it every day.

In Clark County, maintenance workers will install feeders atop buildings in three parks: Robert Price, Paradise and Walnut.

Dropping just corn into the feeders at a specific time every day, parks workers will train pigeons until their flight to the feeders is habitual. Then the feed will be spiked with birth-control pellets.

The county has purchased nine 30-pound bags of birth control at total cost of $1,688. Workers figure this is enough for three months, with each pound able to keep 80 pigeons from getting pregnant. Otherwise, they would be producing two hatchlings each.

After the new fiscal year begins on July 1, Parker said, the county would purchase more bird birth control for at least a year.

In Hollywood, Calif., the Argyle Civic Association started drawing pigeons to feeders in 2007. Since then, the population's decrease has been dramatic, said Annette Ehrlich, association secretary.

"It used to be you would walk down to the corner of Argyle and Franklin (avenues) and there would be hundreds of those birds just sitting there," Ehrlich said. "Now you see a small number, nothing like before."

How it will work in Clark County parks is anyone's guess. Some in the pigeon-control business believe it won't work at all.

"I'm glad to see them thinking about population control, but there's no magic pill for pigeon control," says Oliva, of Nevada Pigeon Control.

Studying a flock and going after its reproductive core is the first step to control, he says. Once the alpha male is out of the picture, the remaining pigeons are easier to "round up and take into custody."

"You're not going to get through this without some sweat. No device or drug is going to work. Pigeons are very, very robust," he says. "They will survive. Clark County's going to learn the hard way. There is no cheap fix."

(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)

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