UPPER EAST SIDE, NY — A web of anti-bird netting recently installed around long-standing scaffolding outside of a massive 320-unit Yorkville building is a literal death trap to the many birds who have already made the scaffolding their home.
The situation has ruffled the feathers of bird and animal activists, who are flocking to the iconic Upper East Side development. Cable Tie
Special education teacher and bird activist Barbara Langlois actually has a history of rescuing birds — including pigeons.
"One of the pigeons I rescued — he died in my hands," said Langlois of a previous bird rescue.
From that experience, she learned from the Wild Bird Fund how to categorize the body condition of ill pigeons.
Langlois rushed over to Normandie Court on Saturday when she saw a call for help on social media.
"These birds looked really rough," she said. "They looked dehydrated. Their body conditions were really bad."
Earlier Langlois witnessed a pair of pigeons separated by the netting, flying up and down, desperately trying to reunite.
"They mate for life," Langlois said of the sometimes dismissed common bird, "you can see all their feathers stuck in the net, their struggle."
The sidewalk shed at Normandie Court, which occupies the entire block at East 95th and 96th streets, between Second and Third avenues, was first permitted in 2020 for façade repairs.
Pigeons and other birds roosting on the shed had made such a mess from the sidewalk, the building received a Department of Health violation.
That's when the building installed the netting.
Once holes formed in the net — a building representative says they were "man-made holes" — the birds returned, finding homes in the scaffolding, whose I-beams make a notoriously idyllic place for ledge-loving birds like the rock dove, or pigeon, to make their nests.
Activists say that the netting which has totally enclosed the scaffolding is new since mid-January or so, and that there could be untold scores of birds inside separated from food, water and, in some cases, family.
"I heard babies in their nest," said Sonia Izak, a neighbor and longtime animal rescuer, "crying for their parents."
“The solution seems pretty simple,” said a spokesperson for the Wild Bird Fund, a bird and wildlife rehab center on the Upper West Side, where many of the injured pigeons have been brought to, “open the netting and let them out…Allowing pigeons to starve to death, choke while trying to escape or die of stress is willful cruelty.”
“We understand the desire to keep pigeons from nesting or roosting on a building, but the methods used must be humane,” the organization said in a statement.
“Netting can create more problems than it solves and ages poorly. We'd encourage the building management to find a better solution.”
Izak, whose dedication to rescuing all creatures great and small in New York has been well documented, said that the netting only recently became so comprehensive that it shut off nesting birds from exiting.
After she and a group from the neighborhood had spent the last week finding dead, sick and injured birds lying in the netting surrounding Normandie Court — and rescuing some — a group returned late Sunday night with a tall ladder to carefully undo some netting and rescue the trapped birds.
"Normandie called the police on us," Izak said, who has her own contacts with the local precinct. Police officers told her that as long as they weren't vandalizing or destroying property, they could rescue the suffering animals, she said.
In total, the group has rescued nearly 20 birds, mostly adult and fledgling pigeons, since November near the building, bringing them to the Wild Bird Fund. At least six baby birds and a handful of adults were rescued just in the past week, said Izak.
On Monday afternoon, as Izak walked underneath the netting, pointing out nests and trapped birds, she spotted a fledgling who had fallen from its nest just above the entrance to the Second Avenue Subway.
The adolescent bird lay motionless in the netting, aside from its labored breathing.
"That bird wasn't there 20 minutes ago," she said. "It's too young to fly. If someone doesn't rescue it, it'll die."
At least three dead birds have been found in the netting over the last few days, Izak said, who shared with Patch grizzly photos of their dead bodies suspended 15 feet above unaware pedestrians.
The company who installed the netting, New Jersey based U.S. Bird Control, proclaims on its website as fact that "no birds have ever been injured or killed by U.S. Bird Control."
"We don't hurt any birds," a man who answered the phone for the company told Patch. "We are just a deterrent."
The man, who did not identify himself before quickly ending the call, said that it was the building's management who decided to totally seal off the scaffolding with anti-bird netting.
When asked about the dead birds found in the company's nets, the man demanded "evidence that they found the dead birds."
"We don't touch birds, we don't kill birds, we don't do anything for the birds," the man said.
A representative for Normandie Court and owner Ogden Capital told Patch that the netting was installed in response to a city citation for an excessive amount of bird droppings underneath the scaffolding, cause by people overfeeding the birds, and that U.S. Bird Control declared the area bird-free before enclosing it with netting.
According to CBS News, the Department of Buildings is set to issue violations against the building for never including the netting in their sidewalk shed permit application.
Despite lacking exact dates as to when the netting was installed, Normandie Court claims that for a while, it worked in keeping birds out until people cut holes in the nets. The building claims they are just trying to fix it and “prevent further harm to pigeons.”
Any efforts from Normandie Court — where a one-bedroom apartment rents for around $4,000-per-month — or their owner, Ogden Capital, has not worked so far, says lawyer Kevan Cleary.
“There's still a lot of birds trapped in there — I counted 20 birds yesterday afternoon,” said Cleary, the chair of the New York County Lawyers Association Animal Law Committee. “It is a serious situation. And there's been no cooperation coming from Ogden.”
The building's representative told Patch they are working to solve the issue as humanely as possible.
Izak said that someone must have come and freed more of the trapped birds after they left their rescue operation because she says many of the birds that were trapped last night were no longer present.
She and other activists said the building could work with them to clear out the scaffolding of nests and birdlings before resealing with new anti-bird nets.
“We've been trying to get them out for a couple of weeks now,” Izak said. “They’re just gonna start dropping dead from starvation and dehydration.”
“If they were really helping, we wouldn’t be out here every day.”
Correction: When Langlois spoke of the bird that died in her hands, that was from a prior rescue which taught her how to categorize the body condition of pigeons.
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