Snow-White Pigeon

For the Poultry Corner:

A Tribute Gone Awry, On the Wings of Pigeons

The New York Times

By RICHARD LEZIN JONES

JERSEY CITY, Sept. 18

It was meant to be a dignified tribute on Sept. 11: a flock of doves
soaring majestically past Lower Manhattan's altered skyline. There was only one
problem. Those weren't doves. They were pigeons. And many of them couldn't fly.

During the memorial service here last week, many of the birds plunged into
the Hudson River, smacked into plate-glass windows on office buildings and
careered into the crowd. One perched atop the hard hat of a construction worker
whose company had helped clear ground zero.

Since the ceremony, animal rights advocates and others have been trying to
rescue the birds and roast the organizers.

For their part, organizers said they had tried to hire a company to conduct a
professional bird release, in which trained doves or homing pigeons would soar
high in the sky and then return to their owner's roost. But the pros were
already booked for 9/11 this year. So the organizers turned instead to a Newark
poultry market and bought 80 squabs, not knowing that the weak-winged birds
would have trouble flying.

Despite the problem at the memorial, which was first reported today in The
Jersey Journal, one organizer said today that most of the birds are better off
now than they would have been had they remained at the poultry market.

"Without a doubt it beats what could have happened to them," said Guy
Catrillo, a chief organizer of Jersey City's 9/11 Memorial Committee.

"They were squab; they were soup birds. I like the idea that I helped these
squab get another chance."

Animal advocates, however, said that second chance may have come at too great
a cost.

"I don't know how anyone could be so short-sighted, especially for 9/11,"
said Ellen Goldberg, a teacher at the Raptor Trust, a nonprofit bird hospital in
Millington, N.J., that is treating two birds that were released during the
ceremony.

"Every year," she said, "we have to deal with 3,000 birds, including 300
pigeons. We get sick birds, injured birds, birds that have been shot. We thought
we'd seen it all. We've never seen this before."

It all began, Mr. Catrillo said, when he started calling the handful of New
Jersey companies that offer professional bird releases.

"They called me looking for birds for their ceremony," said Lisette Hall,
owner of Doves for Love, a company in Somerset, N.J. "They wanted our doves. We
were all booked, but they were desperate for birds. They said, 'Well, please
call us if you have any last-minute availability."'

Ms. Hall, who had already committed to two other memorial services, did not.

So, Mr. Catrillo said, the Jersey City organizers went to the poultry shop.
"I don't remember the name," Mr. Catrillo said. "I know it was Portuguese." They
took delivery of 80 birds on Sept. 10, just hours before the 8 a.m. memorial
service at Exchange Place on the waterfront.

"We were going to release the pigeons during the unveiling of the 9/11
memorial," he said. "The pigeons were supposed to fly."

Instead, the birds, which Ms. Goldberg said might never before in their young
lives have spent significant time outside their cages, turned the ceremony into
a blur of feathers and confusion.

"When they let the birds out, they seemed not to know how to fly," recalled
Susan Ryan, 39, who attended the ceremony with a co-worker, Nuria Almeida. "They
flew into buildings. One flew right into the water."

Ms. Almeida, 30, said the program continued, awkwardly, despite the birds. "A
lot of people were upset because they didn't want them sitting on their heads,
and they were swatting them away," she said.

The two co-workers said they remembered one bird that bobbed across the
stage. Mr. Catrillo took a snapshot of another perched on the hard hat of an
iron worker. The body of another was later fished out of the Hudson.

The women were so struck by the pigeons' plight that they returned to the
site of the memorial service after work that day and gently placed two of the
birds in a shoe box, then took them to the Raptor Trust.

Ms. Goldberg said that the birds appeared undernourished and that hospital
workers were trying to fatten them up. The fate of the others is unknown,
although Mr. Catrillo said he had seen several.

"I saw one today who lives by a hot-dog cart," he said. "I tried to catch
him. But he flew away. Pigeons are natural survivors."

And despite what he called "snide comments" about the release, Mr. Catrillo
said he already had plans for next year's memorial service.

"I'm going to release monarch butterflies," he said. "But I'm sure there's
some group somewhere who will say that that's the wrong thing to do, too."

http://www.nytimes.com

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