New York

Who Would Steal New York City’s Pigeons? Mother Pigeon Thought She Knew.

Published

1 year ago

May 3, 2025

Who Would Steal New York City’s Pigeons? Mother Pigeon Thought She Knew.

Someone is stealing pigeons off New York City’s streets.

Captured in grainy bystander video, it happened on a day in early April in Manhattan, when a man, his face obscured by a low-slung hat, swooped a giant butterfly net over a small flock, scooped up dozens of birds and popped them into the trunk of a car parked on 10th Avenue.

Reviled as rats with wings or, by a slimmer margin, beloved as downy, dirty urban icons, pigeons seem as much a part of New York as its skyline. The sympathetic throw them pretzel chunks, the disgusted kick their way through their sidewalk confabs, and even the agnostic cover their heads when passing below their subway platform roosts.

But who would steal pigeons?

Mother Pigeon, a pro-pigeon activist who feeds flocks of pigeons dressed as a pigeon while also selling felted figurines of pigeons, was sure she had the answer: the two brothers who own a pet store at the edge of Bushwick, Brooklyn. Their shop caters to the city’s dwindling corps of pigeon keepers, and she believes they are reselling the birds for use in live pigeon shoots in Pennsylvania.

And so last month, she and a small collection of pigeon activists showed up at the store, Broadway Pigeons & Pet Supplies, waving placards and chanting on the sidewalk. The owners deny having anything to do with stolen pigeons and say they have been unfairly attacked by pigeon partisans.

But not long after the protest, a new suspect emerged.

Somewhat lost in the conflict is a fact little known to most people: that New York City’s pigeons do, in fact, get snatched with some regularity. There was a rash of thefts in 2017, 2019 and again in 2022, according to Humane World for Animals, which has tracked the nettings. Some of those birds, the organization says, end up as fodder for a controversial but legal sport with committed defenders, in which the main object is to toss a live bird in the air and shoot it.

Dressed in a jacket of felted gray feathers, Mother Pigeon, whose real name is Tina Piña Trachtenburg but who goes by Ms. Piña, crouched in Maria Hernandez Park in Bushwick on a recent weekday, as mottled pigeons tumbled across her hands and shoulders pecking at seed. She earns a living from selling her felt pigeons in parks for between $35 and $75 a piece.

Earlier this month some of her live flock were netted, according to a man whom she pays $10 a day to bird-watch while he hangs out in the park; the flock was less than half the size it was a month ago, she said.

“How sad is this?” she asked, spreading her wings to take in what remained. Tears began to well in Ms. Piña’s eyes. “The propaganda against pigeons is intense.”

This devotion (she calls it “dove-otion”) led her to help organize a rally outside of Broadway Pigeons, casting blame on the two brothers who own it, Michael and Joey Scott, for the disappearances.

Reached at the store, Michael Scott, who had been accused in the past of selling pigeons to shooters, vehemently denied involvement. He said he adored his own 600 pigeons, and was being wrongly and unfairly targeted. The accusations, however, have not dimmed his nearly lifelong love for tending pigeons, he added.

“Show me some pictures of me pigeon-napping, then I’ll start quaking in my boots,” Mr. Scott said in a telephone interview before hanging up.

In a sense, New York’s pigeons belong to the city itself. They are officially designated city wildlife (like raccoons, squirrels and even Astoria the turkey), and it is therefore illegal to trap or kill them.

“I hear from people who absolutely love pigeons, and I hear from a lot of people who are compassionate for all sentient beings but also don’t see the beauty,” said Alexandra Silver, the director of the Mayor’s Office of Animal Welfare. “But I am glad we have a law that spells out that you cannot do this, that you cannot net birds.”

But in Pennsylvania, pigeons are fair game in a sport with a long heritage called flyer shooting. In his law office in Doylestown, Pa., Paul Perlstein, a lawyer and the spokesman for the Pennsylvania Flyers Association, keeps what he says is a 1913 photo of a man sport-shooting pigeons on the Champs-Élysées in Paris; the same city hosted live pigeon shooting as a sport in the 1900 Olympic Games. There has been no accusation that the association has done anything illegal.

In flyer shooting, a bird is tossed by a “columbaire”; once the bird flaps to a certain height, the shooter may take aim.

The pigeons used in the sport are typically “nuisance birds,” according to Mr. Perlstein, that would have been exterminated anyway — pests nesting under bridges, for example, where their highly corrosive droppings can erode pilings.

Indeed, New York City does allow licensed exterminators to kill pigeons. To Mr. Perlstein’s knowledge, no New York City street birds had entered the supply chain of flyer shooting events in Pennsylvania. But there are many clubs and many suppliers. Is there a possibility that someone, somewhere had introduced stolen street pigeons into the events? Maybe.

Inside her workshop in Bushwick, where wire pigeon feet were piled in baskets and a live street pigeon and a fat squirrel darted freely through an open window to the kitchen table, Ms. Piña fretted over the fate of her lost flock and reaffirmed her certainty that the brothers’ pet store was somehow involved. This wasn’t the first time she had targeted the shop: Several years ago, she claimed, she put on a nun’s habit, posed as a customer and secretly released caged birds out of the back of the store. No one, she said, found out.

“She needs help,” said a woman answering the phones at the store who would give only her first name — Lisa, she said — for fear of activist backlash. “She thinks she is a pigeon.”

On April 30, the police arrested Dwayne Daley, 67, of Bushkill, Pa., who they say was scooping up birds in Tompkins Square Park in Manhattan. Officers discovered a truck parked nearby that contained nets and more than 25 pigeons in cages.

Mr. Daley was charged with one count of misdemeanor animal cruelty and released, but he was arrested again the very next day and charged with felony assault for his involvement in an altercation from 2021. Police say he punched a man who tried to stop him from netting pigeons in Brooklyn, knocking out two of the man’s teeth.

In 2007, Mr. Daley was also caught stealing pigeons after a man in East Harlem set up a sting operation to figure out why his beloved pigeon had gone missing. At the time, Mr. Daley said he bred the birds or sold them at auction. “It’s not like I’m doing anything wrong with them,” he said then.

Mr. Daley could not be reached for comment. There is no information suggesting that he is connected with the Brooklyn pet shop.

At the store, Michael Scott said that the attention had unexpectedly doubled his business. He said he had never met Mr. Daley. The April arrest, he said, meant that activists targeting him and his brother were “flying to the wrong coop.”

Mother Pigeon, however, was unapologetic. As she nursed a one-eyed pigeon back to health in her apartment and absorbed news of Mr. Daley’s arrest, she said she still believed the Scotts were up to no good and that she and her group already have plans to protest the shop again.

“If someone came in and took 10 dogs from the dog park, they would have been convicted,” Ms. Piña said. “Pigeons are not considered an animal that people feel they need to love and protect,” she added. “It’s hurtful.”

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New York

How a Writer and Literary Agent Lives on $48,000 in Riverdale

Published

7 hours ago

May 11, 2026

Press Room

How a Writer and Literary Agent Lives on ,000 in Riverdale

How can people possibly afford to live in one of the most expensive cities on the planet? It’s a question New Yorkers hear a lot, often delivered with a mix of awe, pity and confusion.

We surveyed hundreds of New Yorkers about how they spend, splurge and save. We found that many people — rich, poor or somewhere in between — live life as a series of small calculations that add up to one big question: What makes living in New York worth it?

Ask Lori Perkins what was the biggest bargain she ever scored and her life story comes pouring out. The Advanced Placement classes she took at a public high school, Bronx Science, helped her do four years of N.Y.U. in three. She bought her first apartment with money from a buyout she negotiated with a landlord. Got a break on her wedding from a hotel banquet director who was about to retire and a deal on her divorce for landing her lawyer a book contract.

“Every big thing in my life has been a bargain,” Ms. Perkins said last month as she stood in her apartment high above the Hudson River surrounded by the fruits of a lifetime of haggling.

The Herman Miller Noguchi glass coffee table? An invisibly chipped floor model for $700. To save the $700 delivery fee, she and a friend drove up to Westchester, wrapped it in a blanket and rolled it home “like Lucy and Ethel through the hallway.” The fox fur coat hanging over the chair? $20 new at a vintage shop. “When I looked it up, it was a $575 coat.”

The co-op apartment itself — three bedrooms on the 18th floor of a building on a hilltop in Riverdale in the Bronx — was a foreclosure special: $125,000 in 1992.

It is the apartment of someone who has lived — who is living — a full existence. A sign on the bright orange wall in the kitchen says “A clean house is the sign of a wasted life.” Shelves in every room groan beneath the weight of thousands of books.

Setbacks and Silver Linings

As a literary agent, Ms. Perkins, 66, has sold some 3,000 titles, including seven best-sellers — perhaps you’ve read Jenna Jameson’s memoir “How to Make Love Like a Porn Star.” She runs a publishing house, Riverdale Avenue Books, specializing in L.G.B.T.Q. erotica. She edited the zombie bodice-ripper anthology “Hungry for Your Love” and has written or co-written nine books herself, including a pair of paperbacks, “Two Dukes and a Lady” and “Two Dukes Are Better Than One,” that birthed a hybrid genre she calls “duke ménage.”

In the last few years, she’s endured some setbacks, but each one has had a silver lining. Burning through her 401(k) — over $100,000 — to pay for her late mother’s dementia care let Ms. Perkins qualify for Medicaid so that when she got breast cancer early in the pandemic all her expenses were covered. Her treatment at Mount Sinai led her to teach journaling to breast cancer survivors, which led to a grant from the Bronx Council on the Arts to teach at her local senior center, where she has discovered a whole community.

The aftereffects of cancer, coupled with a plunge in her publishing house’s overseas sales, which she attributes to Trump-fueled anti-American sentiment, forced her to downshift a couple of gears, take more time to enjoy things and embrace frugality as a lifestyle.

Here’s the state of her hustle, 2026: She’s getting $22,000 from Social Security, about $20,000 as an agent, a couple thousand for freelance writing and, hopefully, another couple for running writing workshops. She signs up for focus groups, “usually about being old,” and will squeeze about $1,000 out of that. And she has lined up a 10-day, $3,000 gig as a Board of Elections poll worker. All told, she’s looking at little under $50,000.

How to Afford the Day-to-Day

On the spending side, the monthly maintenance on her apartment is $2,000, though she’s looking to downsize and move to a lower floor, which she figures could cut her cost in half. “Somebody can call me and buy my apartment right now.” $750,000!

The maintenance includes use of the complex’s outdoor pool, but she rents a cabana with an umbrella for $500 a year “because I can’t go in the sun, after radiation,” she said.

Insurance on her aging Volkswagen Beetle is $1,900 a year. Her annual pilgrimage to Maine costs about $1,200. Most of the rest is day-to-day stuff. Groceries are maybe $200 a month. “I go to Stew Leonard’s where they have dollar beers,” she said.

She allots $250 a month for entertainment, including meals out. She gets the $10 lunch special to go at the local Chinese restaurant and heats it up for dinner. She never misses Restaurant Week.

She does $5 movie Tuesdays at the Showcase Cinema in Yonkers, $4.50 for Broadway tickets through Club Free Time, an online publication. She re-ups her Hulu and Disney+ subscriptions on Black Friday, when they’re $1.99 or $2.99 a month. She’s going to see Bruce Springsteen at Madison Square Garden on Saturday and the tickets were $130, “so that’s most of my budget for May, but it’s worth it.”

What about museums? Dollar admission at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Cloisters for city residents, free Fridays at the Whitney, pay-what-you wish hours at the Guggenheim. “I used to be a member of all of them, and if I ever had more money I would go back to being a member, but right now I’m taking advantage of their generosity,” Ms. Perkins said.

Her wardrobe budget is minimalist like her fashion. “If it’s winter, I’m wearing black pants and a black shirt. And if it’s summer, I’m wearing a black dress.”

Even her splurges have been bargains. The cruise she took in Italy, using money she had saved by taking the toll-free Broadway Bridge instead of the Henry Hudson Bridge when she drove to Manhattan, was effectively free after she won $1,000 gambling on board.

The Middle Class Fantasy

“I really believe you can do almost anything if you research and plan,” Ms. Perkins said. “It’s the spontaneity that’s hard. And we as Americans are really spoiled.”

Looking back on her journey, Ms. Perkins has reached some conclusions that surprised her.

“Cancer saved my life,” she said. “The life that I was leading was exhausting because I was trying so hard to keep up with this fantasy of middle-classness.”

Now, she said, “I don’t care if I’m wearing last year’s shoes, I don’t need to go out every night to a Michelin-starred restaurant, because I go two times a year, and you know what, when you save up for it, it’s more joyful. Every single thing. Every little joy is a bigger joy. I can’t explain it. I took so much for granted when I had more money.”

Did she mention she’s working on another book?

“It’s called ‘La Vida Broka: How to Live Richly When You’re Dirt Poor,’” Ms. Perkins said. “Just buy the book, because it’s all going to be in there.”

We are talking to New Yorkers about how they spend, splurge and save.

New York

Maya Lin Connects Nature to a New Manhattan Skyscraper and Beyond

Published

19 hours ago

May 10, 2026

Press Room

Maya Lin Connects Nature to a New Manhattan Skyscraper and Beyond

On a recent spring afternoon, the renowned artist and designer Maya Lin clambered up and down a rocky outcropping in Central Park in New York, undeterred by the crowd of tourists that was shooting photos nearby.

While they snapped selfies, she reflected on how this place — and similar geology near her childhood home in Athens, Ohio — had inspired her latest creation: the stone facade on the western walls of the 60-story JPMorgan Chase skyscraper in Midtown Manhattan. Estimated to have cost from $3 billion to $4 billion, and with glowing artwork at the summit visible citywide, it opened last fall and occupies the block between 47th and 48th Streets and Madison and Park Avenues.

Her project, “A Parallel Nature,” is a sculpture composed of two 59-foot-tall and 55-foot-wide gray stone walls set in an intricate design, with plants that peek out from the crevices. An array of flowers has been newly planted on the walls this spring.

Lin’s long career and passion for the environment made her a natural choice for the project.

Now 66, she began her career as a 21-year-old senior at Yale University when she won a competition to design the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, which was dedicated in 1982 in Washington, D.C. Among her many recent projects is the water fountain installation titled “Seeing Through the Universe” for the Obama Presidential Center in Chicago, set to open to the public next month.

Five of Lin’s works will also be on view at Pace Gallery’s booth at Frieze New York this week. There are pieces that call attention to bodies of water that are disappearing or that have already disappeared — Lake Chad in North Africa and the Aral Sea in Central Asia — along with a piece focused on the Antarctic Circle, and a new silver sculpture, “Silver Yellowstone,” that is inspired by the Yellowstone River, widely considered to be the longest free-flowing river in the lower 48 states.

In a recent series of interviews in her home office on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, at the JPMorgan Chase building and during the ramble through the rocky terrain near the lower eastern end of Central Park known as the “Dene,” a British term for a valley, Lin described the woods and rock cliffs she remembered from growing up in Ohio.

“Water would just subtly drip down the cliffs, and there would be ferns and grasses and things growing there,” she explained, adding, “I was definitely out there in nature almost daily, and very concerned about environmental issues.”

Central Park, which Lin explores regularly when she is in Manhattan, was its own inspiration. Her family also has a home in southwestern Colorado, where she hikes and bikes every summer.

In 2022, she and representatives of JPMorgan Chase and Tishman Speyer, the development manager of the new skyscraper, took a daylong walk through the park, looking for a rock formation that could serve as the model for “A Parallel Nature” and “bring a little bit of the character” of the park to the building, Lin said.

They initially failed to identify anything appropriate. Lin returned the next morning on her own and came across the Dene, which she had seen on previous walks through the park.

“When I first got a call to look at the building site, I realized that the subway would be running underneath it,” Lin explained. “And I saw an excavation photo of Grand Central Station that showed that its construction cut through Manhattan’s bedrock. And I just had an idea, ‘What if I could bring bedrock to the surface in the middle of Manhattan?’”

“What I am interested in is, quite literally, grounding you in what might be right below your feet that you might not be aware of,” she added.

Capturing the Dene on the exterior wall of the skyscraper, Lin explained, would enable her to express the character of an exposed stone outcropping in Manhattan, quite literally bringing bedrock to the surface, in a way that echoes the Dene in Central Park.

Lin identified a type of gray granite from Barre, Vt., for “A Parallel Nature” that she called a perfect match with the metamorphic rock known as gneissic schist on which the JPMorgan Chase skyscraper sits.

The 239 stone pieces mounted atop the artwork’s two walls were cut by the Quarra Stone Company, a Wisconsin-based stone fabricator that transported the stone on large, flatbed trucks from Vermont to Wisconsin and then to Manhattan. Lin called the installation of the walls on the facade of the skyscraper her most difficult commission yet.

“Trying to create something that would be a balance between natural and man-made was the aesthetic challenge,” she explained. “And to keep the artwork as a sculptural creation rather than an architectonic solution — also the engineering to fabricate and install — were intricate and extremely complex.”

The stonework on each wall is composed of over 100 pieces of granite, Lin said, “so by grouping 15 to 20 pieces together and ever so slightly tilting them, I was able to create larger groupings to help create what I call city states. These helped make each wall feel like it was comprised of larger plates.”

Each of the pieces is hung, in a puzzle-like formation, from a steel bracket system installed on a steel ladder frame system anchored to the concrete support wall on the lowest level of the building’s Madison Avenue facade.

At the foot of each wall is a streambed with waterworn rocks that came from near the headquarters of the Wisconsin fabricator, chosen to work well with the gray granite walls. Water gently flows in the beds, creating a burbling stream in the middle of Midtown traffic cacophony. Lin calls the stream “an unexpected natural moment in the busy city.”

There are also two sources of water on the walls themselves, meant to irrigate the plantings in the walls’ seams. One is a drip irrigation line installed behind what Lin calls “plant pockets,” holes 10 to 12 inches deep that range in length from 3 to 7 feet and that are designed to hold the artwork’s vegetation.

The second is a drip irrigation system that runs along the top of the rock walls. This gently drips continuous streams of water that find their way down and beneath the surface of the rock, nourishing the plantings in the crevices and ledges. The system is designed to encourage plant growth and to bring the sound of trickling water to the facade.

Lin is working with specialists on the plantings, including Blondie’s Treehouse, a Manhattan plant installer and supplier; Cecil Howell, a Brooklyn-based landscape architect who has worked with Lin on a number of recent environmental art installations; and Richard Hayden, the project’s consulting horticulturist, who is also the senior director of horticulture for the High Line, a public park built on a historic elevated rail line on Manhattan’s west side.

Though some plants were installed in late October, it was understood that since water would not be available until late fall, spring would be the ideal time for fresh planting.

Urban environments are tough on plants, Lin explained, calling the site’s horticulture “an experiment.” The horticulture team is trying more than 30 varieties of plants to see which ones thrive where, she said, adding that she expected the plants to be monitored and plantings adjusted quarterly.

Lin said she wanted “to create a predominantly native New York landscape reminiscent of what you might find naturally growing on rocks and within crevices in actual rock faces and ledges” to make visitors aware of the nature around them.

New plants growing this spring include maidenhair fern, Eastern red columbine, creeping phlox, Christmas fern and dwarf crested iris.

Just across from each of the artwork’s walls are a flower garden and native red maple trees, as well as long, sinuous concrete benches designed by Norman Foster, the skyscraper’s architect, all meant to create a sort of public park.

“A Parallel Nature,” as its name implies, “neither tries to perfectly recreate nature, nor feel architecturally fabricated,” Lin explained. “It is a work that makes ambiguous the line between the natural and the man-made.”

The sculpture is one of five works of public art commissioned for the new building by JPMorgan Chase — whose art collection was founded in 1959 by David Rockefeller, then executive vice president and vice chairman of Chase Manhattan Bank. The skyscraper’s other new works include that LED light work at the summit by Leo Villareal, whose art will also be on view at the Pace Gallery exhibit at Frieze; two paintings by Gerhard Richter in the building’s lobby; a 3-D printed, bronze column by Foster, also in the lobby; and a display of light and motion at the lobby’s elevator banks, driven by custom A.I. models by the Turkish artist Refik Anadol.

David Arena, head of global real estate for JPMorgan Chase, said the bank had deliberately lifted up both the Madison Avenue and Park Avenue bases of the new building 85 feet to create more outdoor space for pedestrians. “When passers-by step on the Madison Avenue curb,” he said, “they are awe-struck, think differently, have a moment of respite.”

“We thought it would be a great spot to make a gift to Manhattan and to people in the neighborhood who can come up, have a seat, enjoy a cup of coffee, enjoy some great art, maybe think differently,” he said.”

He also called Lin “one of the most accomplished modern-day artists, a strong enough talent to be a counterpoint to Norman Foster.”

Lin agrees with Arena’s predictions about the artwork. “Even though it can dialogue with the building in scale, it adds an unexpected, natural respite from the busy street life, offering a different feeling,” she said.

New York

‘She Studied Us for a Moment With Theatrical Longing’

Published

1 day ago

May 10, 2026

Press Room

‘She Studied Us for a Moment With Theatrical Longing’

Under Cover

Dear Diary:

On a false-spring afternoon, my boyfriend, Luis, and I went to the wine bar around the corner from my Williamsburg apartment. We were sitting at the bar having a private conversation when I asked Luis for the time.

“It’s 7:30,” a blonde woman beside us said before he could answer.

She turned toward us with the bright, urgent expression of someone who had already decided we were all having a drink together. She was drunk, her mascara intact, but only just.

“What do you guys do?” she asked.

I told her I was a first-year teacher in Queens. Luis said he would be graduating in the spring and was looking for a job in marketing.

She studied us for a moment with theatrical longing, and then she leaned in so far that her shoulder nearly touched mine.

“I have a secret,” she said, beaming. “You can’t tell anyone.”

We promised.

She glanced toward the open windows, then back at us.

“I have my second interview with the C.I.A. tomorrow,” she whispered.

Luis and I looked at each other.

“If anyone asks,” she added, “tell them I’m interviewing with the Culinary Institute of America.”

A few minutes later, we paid our check, wished her luck and promised not to tell a soul.

— David Reyes-Mastroianni

Moon Over Manhattan

Dear Diary:

I was walking out of Central Park on a cold February evening when a woman who couldn’t have been five feet tall approached me.

“Have you seen the moon?” she asked.

I tried to brush her off, but she repeated herself.

I turned to see the most brilliant full moon shining above the park. It stopped me in my tracks on a day when I had been in constant motion.

I turned to thank the woman, but she was gone. It was as if the moon herself had come down to demand attention and had left as soon as attention was paid.

— Rebecca Falcon

Wrapped Up

Dear Diary:

Late one night after I moved to Manhattan from the rural South in 1989, I was riding the No. 6 train home from my job at Mortimer’s when I sat down across from what appeared to be a man completely wrapped in a sheet and lying across several seats.

He was wrapped so tightly that there seemed to be no way he could have done it himself.

I couldn’t discern any movement. Not a breath. Not a sound. Did he need help? Was he dead? Was this performance art? What should I do?

No one else seemed to be paying any attention, but my agitation must have been visible, because finally, an impeccably dressed older woman wearing white gloves and a hat with a lace veil leaned toward me.

“I don’t think he wants to be disturbed,” she said.

— Brian McMaster

Pretty Peaches

Dear Diary:

I was walking down 79th Street when I heard a woman with a large, coral-colored cockatoo on her shoulder say: “Excuse me. Can you hold my bird?”

I looked around. Was she talking to me?

She huffed at my two seconds of confusion.

“Just put your arm out!” she said.

I did, and while this woman answered her phone, her imposing bird with claws as big as my hands hopped onto my wrist, then sidled up my arm and onto my shoulder.

She was heavier than I expected. Not quite like having a dog on my shoulder, but maybe a cat.

I wanted to look at her. It’s not every day you have a large bird sitting on you, but I was afraid that if I did, she might gouge out my eyeballs with her imposing beak.

I decided to fix my eyes on a nearby street sign and hope for the best. The bird told me her name was Peaches, that she was 7 years old and also that she was pretty.

My first thought was: Well, aren’t we a little full of ourselves? But then I caught myself. Good for you, Peaches, I thought. I wish I had your confidence.

I told Peaches I had an appointment and hoped her owner would get off the phone soon.

Then Peaches gripped my shoulder a little tighter with her claws and stretched the top of her body up and over my head so that I was wearing her like a pair of earmuffs.

“I love you,” she said.

We stayed in this magical bird hug for a minute or two before her owner whisked her off my shoulder with a halfhearted “Thanks” and hurried away.

Peaches turned her head 180 degrees, seemed to look at me longingly and disappeared into the day.

— Eileen Kelly