For ten days this August, a fresh-faced 41year-old named Jeffrey Traill trolled Hollywood in his Honda, videotaping pigeons. Pigeons lined the ArcLight theaters near the Walk of Fame, commandeered the roof at Big Lots!, perched along power lines like stolid chess pieces. “Pigeons,” Traill says in his video, shakily framing one roost. “Pigeons,” he says again, wrenching his camera toward another. The effect is nauseating. “Over there,” he says. “Over there. Over there.” Traill is one of a half-dozen neighborhood activists whose volunteer campaign against these birds has escalated idiosyncratically for more than a year. Their leader, Laura Dodson, had ordered him out on yet another round of surveillance, to update the group’s hulking pigeon “dossier.” “We’re kind of an unusual neighborhood association,” Dodson told me. Dodson has lived in Hollywood for 29 years. She likes pigeons and does not want them killed or made to suffer. She said this repeatedly in the clipped, mildly truculent way she says a lot of things. But having helped muscle gangs and drugs out of her neighborhood in the 80’s, Dodson says she feels besieged again. She and her group, the Argyle Civic Association, have turned to a series of unconventional approaches to neutralize a problem they simply refuse to put up with. “We’re in the middle of the biggest boom, and there’s pigeons everywhere - like where they’re going to put the W hotel,” she says, invoking, as she often does, the upscale hotel as a symbol of Hollywood’s hard-won renaissance. “There’s nothing but pigeon poop.” A pigeon dispenses about 25 pounds of excrement a year. Often this gunk must be blasted off hard-to-reach places using boom lifts and steam hoses. Pigeon-related damage in America has been estimated to cost $1.1 billion a year. But the full scope of our disdain and distrust for the birds is impossible to quantify; it’s hard even to explain. Marketing by the bird-control industry - a lucrative offshoot of the $6.7-billion-a-year pest-control business - reminds us that pigeons and their dung can spread more than 60 diseases. This is true, but not necessarily panic-inducing, given the exceedingly rare incidences of respiratory infections like cryptococcosis. For much of the 20th century, controlling pigeons primarily meant killing them. (Culling remains a common fallback position; the United States Department of Agriculture kills 60,000 pigeons a year in response to complaints.) But even the trade journal Pest Control now warns that with “millions of bird lovers out there,” you must consider “the publicity you would receive if your local paper runs photos of hundreds of poisoned pigeons flopping around on Main Street.” As we have become less tolerant of the birds, we have also, somehow, grown more concerned about their well-being. The bird-control industry has evolved to fill this paradoxical niche. Pigeon control has increasingly become about moving pigeons elsewhere. With a staggering catalog of spikes, nets, sticky gels, coiled-wire barriers, ultr