Vancouver Police’s “Syringe Nest Photo” Disputed

by Ryan Ponto | May 3, 2017 | Bird Netting

A picture of a pigeons’ nest made entirely from used syringes has been shared by police in the Canadian city of Vancouver to highlight its drug crisis but experts have questioned its authenticity.

Shared on social media by Superintendent Michelle Davey, she said it had been found in a single room occupancy in the Downtown Eastside area of the city, The Independent reported.

She described the image as reflecting the “sad reality of the opioid crisis” in the city.

She also added “#notstaged”—a claim disputed by some social media users who have said it is a hoax.

Luc-Alain Giraldeau, a scientist at l’Universite du Quebec a Montreal, told the National Post newspaper that he was certain the image did not show a real pigeons’ nest.

He said it contained too many eggs as pigeons usually only lay two at a time. He added that it lacks the thick coat of pigeon feces that the birds typically use to keep their eggs warm. Pigeon nests are “always constructed on a flat surface”, he said.

He declared: “This cannot be a pigeon nest.”

Marion Chatelain, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Warsaw specializing in the urbanization of wildlife, agreed.

“To the best of my knowledge, feral pigeons do not use human wastes to build their nest,” she wrote in an email to the National Post, adding that it is very peculiar to see more than two eggs in a nest.

Nathaniel Wheelwright, a veteran bird biologist at Maine’s Bowdoin College, told the newspaper, “My first reaction was that it looks faked.”

However he added: “But then pigeons do build flimsy platform nests of thick twigs and house wrens sometimes nest in bags of nails. So, it could be.”

Regardless of the authenticity of the image, it has served to draw international attention to the city’s problem with prescription opioid abuse.

Call to nature

by Ryan Ponto | May 2, 2017 | Bird Netting

PITTSBURG, Kan. — If the neighbors happened to hear Bob Mangile in his front yard earlier this spring hooting at a towering pecan tree, they didn’t let on that they thought it was odd.

“Hoo-hoo hoooooo hoo-hoo,” he called, hands cupped around his mouth to amplify the sound.

He was tenaciously trying to get a great horned owl to reveal more of itself than just its iconic ear tufts, which could be seen — but just barely — in the crotch of the tree.

On this day, his efforts were fruitless.

No matter. Inside, in his many photo files, he has evidence for anyone interested that there was yet another owl species nesting and rearing young just feet from the Pittsburg bungalow he shares on three acres with his wife, Liz.

Giving up on the owl, Mangile moved from the front yard to the back to say hello to more wildlife; first chickens, then a squirrel he feeds by hand, then a few hundred pigeons and lastly, a wren renting a coffee can in his workshop. Soon, when the weather is warm enough, he’ll add bullfrogs, salamanders and turtles to the list.

Forty years ago, none of it was here.

“It was a naked, bare horse pasture when we moved here,” Mangile said.

Today, it’s a wildlife sanctuary, certified by the state and filled with plant and animal life. But the couple are not done yet.

“It takes 40 years to grow a forest, but it takes much longer for those trees to die off and allow woodpeckers, squirrels and so on to nest in hollowed out trunks and stumps,” Mangile said. “Folks do not realize that a view of a lot of green trees is not a complete forest.”

Wild child

Mangile grew up in Chicago, an unlikely place to develop an affinity for nature. It was a childhood friend there who unwittingly introduced him to caring for pigeons.

“He got a BB gun for Christmas, and he wanted to show me how good he was with it,” Mangile said. “He shot a feral pigeon off of a bungalow, and it tumbled to the ground and we caught it.”

With an injured wing, it couldn’t fly. But it laid an egg that night.

Lacking any other nesting material, the two friends cut a hole in most of the pages of an old book and made a bowl-like structure and put the egg in it. They watched and waited.

“It never hatched, of course, but that was how my love affair with taking care of pigeons started,” Mangile said.

About the same time, Liz was growing up in Southeast Kansas, becoming an angler at a young age. She learned to seine and fish on the Neosho River, where her dad would awaken her during the night to run lines. She has fond memories of those days.

Today, she doesn’t mind that Bob has around 300 pigeons in backyard coops. He’s a self-taught expert on pigeon genetics and earlier this spring sent samples of the “blood feathers” of several of his pigeons to the University of Utah. There, as part of a DNA sequencing project, they are being tested for the relationship of two unique genes as they relate to blindness or vision impairment.

Nor does she mind that he actively encourages broad-headed skinks by creating habitat — dead trees, stumps and rock piles — in their yard. By doing so, he’s developed a breeding population of the skinks, which are on the threatened species list in Kansas.

Birds of a feather

Both founders of the Sperry-Galligar Audubon Chapter some 20 years ago and still active members, the couple enjoy feathered wildlife best of all.

They’ve built countless bird houses for others, are fixtures at the chapter’s annual birdseed sale to raise funds for projects, help to coordinate the annual Christmas bird count, and for years, Bob has kept tedious records of the fledging success of fellow bluebirders who keep nesting boxes.

He was elated when owls began nesting here. First, it was screech owls who chose a box on a tree in the back pasture. The owls would often visit the squirrel boxes he installed by the back door, popping up at dusk and sitting in the openings for awhile, sometimes calling into the night.

Then, barred owls took up residence. Not to be confused with barn owls, they’re the ones that call “Who cooks for you? Who cooks for you all?” They fledged babies in the backyard as well, then moved to the huge pecan tree out front.

Again last year, in the pecan tree, the barred owls nested. There were no babies — at least none that Mangile could see — and he speculated that a great horned owl made lunch of them.

This year, it was a great horned owl that nested there in the pecan tree. Mangile isn’t sure it was successful, as it disappeared about the time he expected a hatching.

Hands on

Mangile paused for a moment on his jaunt around the acreage to call to a squirrel and feed it by hand. It’s a common occurrence, he said — it knows his voice. Moments later, a chicken approached and allowed him to pick it up. And when he reached inside one of his many coops, pigeons allowed him to handle them.

“A few years ago, a barred owl baby fell from the tree, and I picked it up and put it back in a different tree on our west fence line,” Mangile recalled.

It stayed for a few days before hopping south from tree to tree, then taking flight.

“I’ve had bullfrogs tame enough to touch at my pond out back,” he said. “And Boxie the Box Turtle — it would come up for food and allow me to handle it without any fear. Type in ‘Boxie the turtle eating’ in YouTube, and you can see some video.”

Mangile, who retired years ago from McNally Manufacturing, said he’s been interested in nature and had an affinity for wildlife for as long as he can remember.

“People ask how long, and I just say, ‘I guess I was born this way’,” he said.

Pigeons, plantings, and war in Germany

by Ryan Ponto | May 1, 2017 | Bird Netting

With a hungry nation at war against Germany in spring 1917, the Arkansas Gazette encouraged gardening. And people gardened.

But not simply because one Little Rock newspaper said to. Many entities and agencies heard the call from Assistant U.S. Agriculture Secretary Carl Vrooman for more planting of food crops.

His “war gardens” didn’t acquire the nickname remembered today — victory gardens — until World War II, but the concept was full blown in 1917. Families should grow their own so the commercial food supply could be diverted to troops and starving allies.

Among patriotic efforts, the Cotton Belt, Iron Mountain and Rock Island railroads offered unused land along their rights-ofway to gardeners, free of charge. Iron Mountain even had its own agriculturist, one Clyde O. Carpenter, son of Perrian P. Carpenter of Little Rock. “C.O.” only rarely appeared in print as “Clyde O.,” which suggests he had a friend inside the press.

On March 23, 1917, the Gazette added a gardening advice column written by Carpenter, who also was — inhale — “agricultural commissioner of the Arkansas Profitable Farming Bureau of the Little Rock Board of Commerce.” Fred Heiskell, managing editor of the Gazette, also belonged to the profitable bureau, and the newspaper covered its doings like white on rice. Carpenter’s first advice?

Home gardeners should not be discouraged because of the recent rainy and unfavorable weather. There still is time to plant and raise all the vegetables that have been mentioned in the bulletins issued by the Board of Commerce except early peas. However, there are some late varieties of peas that may be planted. “Iron Mountain” was the nickname of the debt-ridden St. Louis, Iron Mountain and Southern Railway, which in May 1917 completed its merger with the no-longer bankrupt Missouri Pacific Railroad. Also in May, Carpenter left to lead the Texarkana Chamber of Commerce. He had been Iron Mountain’s farm man for six years.

Announcing his loss to Little Rock on May 13, the Gazette published an interview with a photograph. Readers saw a clean-shaven, fair-haired 30-yearold with an altar-boy sort of face and round wire glasses.

Just a year later, Carpenter left the Chamber to manage a big

cotton and ranching concern owned by Mann Land & Investment Co. on the Red River. And it wasn’t long after that he landed another new job, as farm agent for the Bank of Jonesboro.

The Gazette continued to find in him a highly quotable source on Profitable Farming Bureau affairs through early 1920, when he was hired away from Jonesboro by the Fourth National Bank of Macon, Ga.

Two other bureau stalwarts soon cut a pigeon wing (left rapidly) for that bank, and for a while afterward the Gazette took a keen interest in the wondrous advances in farm practice being made in Macon.

Besides earnest gardening advice, humor cropped up here and there, such as this from April 15, 1917:

Fervid Request for “Dope” on Home Gardens

Grown desperate by facing the rising cost of “sowbelly” et al., T.H. Hale, 3516 West Tenth street, Little Rock, Ark., sent the following appeal to the Profitable Farming Bureau of the Board of Commerce for instructions on raising a home garden.

“Enclosed find stamp, for which please send to my address … the bulletin on ‘The Home Garden in the South.’

“Sowbelly at 40 cents per, chops (mostly bones) at 25 cents and all necessaries competing with the zeppelins in soaring ability, is sufficient inducement for one to try to raise something, even though it be nothing but hell, for that is about as good a term as I can think of when I break my back trying to reach the bottom of a bed of slate through the medium of a pick in an effort to persuade a radish to look at the rising sun — to say nothing about the neighbors’ chickens adding to the torments in successful efforts to resurrect the

radish, thereby adding fuel to the already hot flames.”

Here’s a different horticultural hell, from April 18:

Pigeons Ruin Gardens

Fred Parrett, 2318 West Seventh street, who is growing, or attempting to grow, a home garden, complained to the police yesterday that his chickenwire fence was ineffective for pigeons, which fly into his garden all day long to feast on the seed he plants.

That was followed by this, May 9:

May Shoot at Pigeons that Harm Gardens

Special to the Gazette. Pine Bluff, May 8. — Following the passage of an ordinance which makes it illegal for owners of chickens to let fowls run at large in the the city, the City Council has announced that home gardeners will be permitted to use their shotguns in defense of their gardens against pigeons, which are said to be doing considerable damage.

We must not imagine that pigeons were universally reviled.

Advertisements convey the going rate for Purina pigeon feed was $4.75 for 100 pounds; and small businesses had pigeons for sale in the classifieds. Gummer Squab Plant at 1217 College St. in Little Rock had “homer pigeons, $1.50 per pair; Carneaux pigeons, $3 per pair, also squabs.”

On June 4, rail agent W.G. Hopkins played a key role in a St. Louis pigeon race by releasing a shipment of 36 pigeons promptly at 11 a.m. at Beebe.

And this item landed in the Oct. 14 Gazette:

Pigeon in Long Flight

Members of the various Concourse Associations here — men devoted to the breeding and flying of homing pigeons — are much interested in the recent long distance flight undertaken by a dozen of the best birds belonging to members of the Pittsburgh association. The birds were taken to Denver, Colo., and there released for a flight to the home lofts, a distance of approximately 1,500 miles.

Fritz, a pigeon which has made a number of long distance flights for his owner, Dr. O.J. Bennett, won the race by making the trip in 11 days and five hours, after making a long detour to the north to escape the torrid heat across the Mississippi valley, as did all the birds, shortly after their release at Denver. The flight is supposed to be a record for the route, though the 1,500 miles has been covered by old birds in fewer hours, when flying from the South to the North on clear days in midsummer.

Only seven birds arrived, the last after 21 days and three hours.

“Pigeon handlers” were among the skilled recruits sought for the Army when Maj. Walton D. Hood, commander of the 312th Signal Battalion at Little Rock, announced in December 1917 that he had 200 openings.

So there were pigeon fanciers and pigeon haters, and both may have cited the war to back up their opinions. Might have … but I haven’t found evidence in the archives that anyone did.