skeletonbow: Wow. I'm certainly not a member of PETA (except maybe People Eating Tasty Animals...), but that is atrocious. And I hate pigeons and have even killed some of them myself in the past, regrettably as a means of pest control.
JunglePredator: You monster.
They're not scavengers like crows. How pest-ful could they be?
NO COAL FOR YOU THIS YEAR!
>:-|
It was around 1999 or so and I lived on the 3rd story of a rather large old house. The soffit was damaged and pigeons decided to move in and take over the place. The landlord tried every common way to scare them away or deter them, as did I, including fake owls, tinfoil pie plates, and just about every other method one might find a Youtube video on etc. and they just simply didn't seem to give a crap about any of it. I would get woken up by a cacophony of "RICKETY COOO.. RICKETY COOO" every day until I had a headache, to go look outside the window and see not one but TWO pigeons comfortably nestled on top of the plastic owl used to scare them away. They seemed to love that little present and fight over who got to sit on the owl next. Eventually my landlord and I ran out of options and even though we weren't fond of the idea of bringing them to an untimely demise we ran out of options.
So I was given a pellet air rifle to take care of the problem, while he was putting things in place to try to get the roof fixed up. I got a handful of them which the neighbour's cat seemed to end up enjoying for dinner at least. The house got fixed up and we managed to get the rest of the birds out of there alive although it was a bit difficult to do. In hindsight, I would do it differently in the future if it occurred, probably hiring a professional bird freak or something to transplant them to another location safe and sound as treating them like rodents as we did ended up having other consequences of cleaning up the mess afterwards as well as some damage from "oops!" and whatnot. :)
Not sure why the landlord didn't just call professionals in the first place though, he wasn't a cheapo or anything like that, it just never came to mind for whatever reason. He felt the same as I did after the fact though, that we made more problems than we solved, arguably both for ourselves and our unwanted guests. :) Their rickety-coos still haunt my nightmares to this day though. :)