Well, this one time, many, many years ago, I lived in a house with my mother in Highland Park, Illinois. A new neighbor had just moved in to the house next door. The woman there was an "animal lover" (swallow). We began to notice an increase in birds and squirrels along the fence between our driveway and the neighbor's. She was putting out about 25 pounds of birdseed per day, just, you know, in a big ugly pile in her driveway and all the rif-raf in the 'hood was taking advantage. It was cute and it was fine. One day however, I happened to catch a glimpse of a large flock of birds circling our neighborhood. It was 70 or eighty pigeons (I believe from a distant viaduct) and they all landed on the roof of our house. They would swoop down to the neighbor's bird seed and back up to our roof. This happened every single day. Our patio and driveway and cars and roof began to take on a Jackson Pollack appearance. It was becoming a poop bummer. My mother did not want to approach the neighbor about it because my mom is a good, Episcopalean woman and that is not the Episcopalean way.
I hatched a way-cool plan to eradicate some pigeons and drive the rest away. I bought a B-B gun. See? It was one of those you pump with air and ker-pow. I would simply kill ten or twenty pigeons and the rest would see their brothers demise and find safer digs. See? I had to do it so our neighbor wouldn't see, because she was an animal lover and something bad would happen, my mom said so. Plus, it is actually illegal, as I had found out years earlier, to shoot a B-B gun in your backyard, even just for fun, even if you don't hit a neighbor's window or car, but especially if you are killing stuff. So, I sat back where I wouldn't be seen by either neighbor, close to our fence. I would simply pick them off as they sat there, stupidly coo-ing and bobbing their heads. One by one. It was a two story house with a really steep roof, so they would roll off, see? They were easy pickin's because there were so many, I couldn't miss. I hid by our fence, pumped 'er up, pointed at the flock and ker-ping!
The entire flock (except one) EXPLODED into the sky. The noise was incredible. One pigeon did not. It staggered along the shingles, gasping and holding it's chest. As the flock was circling overhead they formed an arrow, pointing down at me. It was early evening and backyard floods began to switch on. The injured pigeon fell over and flopped slowly, noisily down the roof. He kept saying "Jesus!" and "Help me!" It took almost 5 minutes for it to reach the gutter and slowly fall to the patio, screaming the whole way down. I ran over and picked it up by one wing and moved it quickly into the back yard where it kept flopping around. The pigeon was begging for it's life now and I didn't know what to say. I need to shut him up, quickly. "I'm sorry" is all I could think of. I heard our neighbor's screen door slam and I put the pigeon into an old Banker's box near the garage. I hid the B-B gun and took the box way way to the back of the yard. I gently set a large cinder block on the pigeon, to settle it down. As I did, it let out a long, slow sig-h-h-h-h. My plan was not panning out as I had seen it in my head. I left the box with the pigeon and the cinderblock in it under some bushes by the back fence in our yard. As I walked away, he said "Please, don't just leave me here!" and I could hear soft sobbing. The pigeon filled the box, it was the size of a fryer hen from the grocery store. In the morning, the box was empty of bird and block. I wonder which of our local residents had come by in the night and taken it. There was a mid-size raccoon seated on the roof of a garage right next to ours. He saw me looking at the empty box and winked at me and rubbed his fat little tummy. Then he mimicked a man shooting a rifle and shook his head from side to side. That is the circle of life, for certain. It's also typical of how many of my schemes turned out, due to a serious lack of foresight. My mother went next door the next day and requested that my neighbor put her bird seed in a new spot that wouldn't encourage the pigeons to roost on our roof and our neighbor was quite accommodating. So, my mom learned a valuable lesson about people and communication and stuff. I learned a valuable lesson about pigeon behavior. Also, that raccoons are fond of pigeon meat. Years later, my B-B gun was used by a friend of mine, who lived in the North Woods, where home owners shoot red squirrels and chipmunks on sight. They get inside a cabin's walls, where they chew on wiring and often will rewire all the circuits, so when you flip the front porch light-switch on, the kitchen lights go on instead. That costs thousands of dollars to correct. What's a home owner to do? I have never shot another living creature ever since that horrible day. Except a chipmunk or two and I can tell you that they throw their arms out and fall over just like in the movies, which is creepy and I don't do it anymore either.