While we were in London, Sub-Evil Boy and I went out to Leicester Square early Saturday morning to get some cheap theatre tickets. We were there an hour before they opened, so we wandered around some, stumbling upon Trafalgar Square along the way. Standing in the square was the annual Xmas tree from Norway, and (quite surprisingly) sitting in the tree was a hawk there in the center of London.
Turns out that that it was there on "official business", being used to scare off the great squadrons of pigeons that frequent the square. It was clearly successful in the sense that the pigeons were all up wheeling in the distance. We had a nice chat with the hawk’s handler, and I asked him about the long term effectiveness of this approach. Apparently presence of food outweighs threat to life and wing.
The handler talked about walking through a veritable carpet of pigeons drawn by a couple with a large bag of seeds, completely unmoved by the presence of the hawk. Recently he saw a truck passing slowly in front of the National Gallery kill 13 pigeons who refused to move because of a large supply of corn on the road. We didn’t see any actual attacks when we were there, but the handler did say that it’s not uncommon for the hawk to get a pigeon or two out of a visit.
Below is the handler calling the hawk down from the top of the National Gallery. That’s a small (dead) baby chick in his right hand, which is the hawk’s treat when it comes down to him.
