Spanish Oddities
Tricking the pigeons in Valencia
By m.p. - Nov 9, 2009 - 2:50 PM
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A City Hall employee hunting pigeons in Valencia – www.20minutos
The birds are to be moved to coops where the females will hopefully not realise their eggs have been swapped with ping pong balls
Valencia City Hall is taking steps to control its pigeon population and is moving the birds to new homes in the city’s parks. The coops have been built with money from the Plan Zapatero and the aim is to capture the female pigeons with the idea that the males will follow.
The next stage in Plan Pigeon will be to keep the pigeons shut up for the first month, obviously fed and watered, until they become accustomed to their new home. The females will be allowed to keep their first batch of eggs, but in later batches the eggs will be exchanged for plastic models, similar, 20 minutos says, to ping pong balls.
City Hall hopes to drastically reduce Valencia’s estimated 30,000 pigeon population in this way.
(environment story)