August 2, 2013

Not Flying Rats, to Him

By COREY KILGANNON

William MacLeod says he was always in the “rats with wings” camp regarding New York City pigeons, until one day six years ago in Washington Square Park, where he spied a pair of chicks on the ground. He nurtured them for weeks and released them back into the park.

“This is Jaco and his brother Jicky,” he said on Tuesday, introducing the two adoptees, all grown-up with handsome reddish plumage. He spotted the pair immediately in a flock of dozens feeding in the park, and they came to his call and perched on either shoulder.

“I’m their human,” said Mr. MacLeod, 47, as he billed and cooed with them and fed them from a bag of nuts and seeds in the pocket of his suit jacket.

Of the several hundred pigeons that gather daily in the park during the day — they roost on nearby buildings at night — Mr. MacLeod recognizes and has names for perhaps 40 of them. Seven of those are his adopted birds, including Jaco and Jicky and their offspring — Jicky begot Dean, who begot Pinot, etc. — and a couple of rescues.

Jaco was named after the electric bass player Jaco Pastorius, whom Mr. MacLeod, also a bass player, said he watched playing in Washington Square for money. Mr. MacLeod splits his time between a house on Long Island and a pied-à-terre in the West Village, where on weeknights his pigeons spend the night roosting.

“They’re waiting there on the window sill when I get home,” he said. Mr. MacLeod said he himself was adopted, and grew up largely in Stuyvesant Town, loving and loved by unlikely animals like squirrels and unfriendly dogs.

He is not one of those scruffy types who slops out the seed and gets covered with pigeon droppings — although he does hang around with some of those folks in the park. He is a sharply dressed real estate agent with Miron Properties and he lets pigeons — well, his pigeons anyway — roost, even on his designer suits, because his birds are trained not to leave droppings on him.

“You see that?” he said like a proud parent. “Jaco just flew away and pooped and now he’s back.”

Mr. MacLeod, whose office is nearby on East 10th Street, visits the park on weekdays and musters his birds like a drill sergeant.

“It’s kind of like going home in the middle of the day and playing with your cat or dog,” he said, standing with some of the other pigeon lovers in the park, including Paul Zig, 55, who is known as Pigeon. Mr. Zig, a local fixture always draped in pigeons that feed from his hands, helped convert Mr. MacLeod.

There was Larry Reddick, 47, who picked up the pigeon habit while living on a park bench here, and there was Doris Diether, 86, the well-known local preservationist who has adopted her own pigeon, also named Doris.

Mr. MacLeod saw Mr. Zig lose his rent-regulated apartment on Carmine Street after it became overrun with roosting pigeons. So Mr. MacLeod limits the birds he feeds, and positions himself as more of a spokesman than a mass feeder.

“Most of the time you see people with pigeons, they’re homeless or nutty,” he said. “People see me in a suit and instead of thinking, ‘He’s crazy,’ they ask me, ‘Hey, is that your bird?’ ”

Then the conversation starts, opening the door to make another “pigeon convert,” by convincing them that the birds are not disease-spreading vermin, but rather “the forgotten pet,” domesticated thousands of years before cats and dogs.

A group of tourists from Chicago walked by and stared at the pigeon Mr. MacLeod had on his shoulder.

“Her name is Gloria — she lives with me,” he told them. “I found her under a bench — somebody had kicked her, so I brought her to the vet and wound up taking her in.”

When raptors are overhead — be it the kestrels from Avenue of the Americas, the red-tailed hawks from a ledge at New York University’s Bobst Library, or the peregrine falcons from the vicinity of Father Demo Square, at the corner of Bleecker and Carmine Streets — the pigeons suddenly huddle on tree branches, and Mr. MacLeod orders his pigeons to his shoulders.

If one of his pigeons does soil his suit, he will “deny them shoulder privileges” for a while.

“Luckily, my dry cleaner is also a parrot guy,” Mr. MacLeod said. “The secret is to let it dry first without rubbing it into the fibers, because that can burn a hole in your clothing. Then you use baking soda to neutralize the acid.”

As for those “Do Not Feed the Pigeons” signs at the park entrances, Mr. MacLeod said, “When they were putting them up, a park worker came over to me and assured me, ‘These signs aren’t for you.’ ”

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