When the Lafayette Police Department needed help fighting one of its most callous and relentless foes, the call went out last spring for outside help.
Who came? Batman?
Nope. Just a guy with a degree in architectural design and a plan to rid the new Police Department roof of flocks of stubborn pigeons.
“Pigeons, with their droppings, they can get just really nasty,” said Ben Adams, chief executive of Adams Bird Control & Consulting in Fort Collins.
As he’s done with other businesses in other parts of the state, Adams installed a netting system and a low-voltage, humane shock track to shoo the birds away.
In about three weeks, the pigeons were gone and officers no longer had to dodge piles of pigeon dung on their way into the squad room.
“The pigeons have just realized this is not a good place to nest or raise their young,” said Lafayette police Cmdr. Mark Battersby.
Problems with the pigeons began soon after Lafayette opened its new police building last year. The birds flew in from nearby farmland and found the overhangs and pipes in the sparkly new structure very inviting, Battersby said.
Public-works employees were constantly cleaning up after the pigeons.
“We were also concerned about our employees slipping in the fecal matter and about the risk for disease,” Battersby said.
Some companies advocated poisoning the birds.
“But I didn’t want my name associated with that,” he said. “We wanted to do this humanely as possible.”
The city eventually found Adams, who, while designing buildings early in his career, learned the most effective way to deal with pigeons and other wild animals is to make nesting for them difficult.
“So many of these companies have this philosophy of kill, kill, kill,” Adams said. “This is just a better way of doing it.”
Monte Whaley: 720-929-0907 or mwhaley@denverpost.com
