New York
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.”
New York
Essential New York City Movies Picked by Ira Sachs and Blondie’s Debbie Harry and Chris Stein
Film
‘Make Way for Tomorrow’ (1937), directed by Leo McCarey
The log line: After the bank forecloses on their home, an elderly couple must separate, each living with a different one of their adult children.
The pitch: “It’s a film that Orson Welles famously said ‘would make a stone cry,’” says Sachs, 60, about McCarey’s movie, singling out a long sequence at the end that depicts “a date through certain lobbies and bars of New York City that offers a snapshot of Midtown in the ’30s.”
‘The World of Henry Orient’ (1964), directed by George Roy Hill
The log line: A wily 14-year-old girl and her best friend follow a ridiculous concert pianist, on whom they have a crush, around the city.
The pitch: Hill’s 1960s romp inspired Sachs’s film “Little Men” (2016), which is about boys around the same age as these protagonists. “It’s an extraordinarily sweet film that also seems, to me, very honest,” he says.
‘Coming Apart’ (1969), directed by Milton Moses Ginsberg
The log line: Rip Torn plays an obsessive psychiatrist who secretly films all the women passing through his home office, inadvertently capturing his own mental breakdown.
The pitch: Shot in one room with a fixed camera, Ginsberg’s film “really feels of a time,” says Sachs. It’s also “very sexual and very free,” reminding him of what’s possible when it comes to making movies.
‘Deadly Hero’ (1975), directed by Ivan Nagy
The log line: A disturbed, racist cop saves a cellist from a crook, only to become her tormentor.
The pitch: Harry, 80, and Stein, 76, were extras in Nagy’s film, which stars Don Murray, Diahn Williams and James Earl Jones as the cop, the cellist and the crook, respectively. The pair call the movie “[expletive] weird,” but also say that their day rate — $300 — “was the most money we’d ever made on anything” up to that point.
‘News From Home’ (1976), directed by Chantal Akerman
The log line: An experimental documentary by Akerman, a Belgian filmmaker who moved to New York in her early 20s, the film features long takes of the city and voice-over in which the director reads letters from her mother.
The pitch: “I’m intrigued by how beauty contains sadness in the city,” says Sachs. Not only is her film a “beautiful record of the city” but it captures “what it is to be alone here, to have left some sort of community and, in particular for Chantal, separated from her mother.”
‘Wolfen’ (1981), directed by Michael Wadleigh
The log line: Albert Finney stars as a former N.Y.P.D. detective who returns to the job to solve a violent and bizarre string of murders.
The pitch: Wadleigh’s film is not only a vehicle for Finney, says Stein, it also “has a lot of footage from the South Bronx when it was still completely destroyed” by widespread arson in the 1970s.
‘Losing Ground’ (1982), directed by Kathleen Collins
The log line: Collins’s film — the first feature-length drama for a major studio directed by an African American woman — observes a rocky relationship between a college professor and her painter husband.
The pitch: Sachs calls “Losing Ground” “a revelation.” The characters are “so human and fascinating and extremely modern,” he says, adding that he loves a movie that “exists in some very complete version of the local.”
‘After Hours’ (1985), directed by Martin Scorsese
The log line: In Scorsese’s black comedy, an office worker (Griffin Dunne) has a surreal and bizarre evening of misadventure while trying to get back uptown from a woman’s apartment in SoHo.
The pitch: Harry and Stein recommend this zany tale and borderline “nightmare” for the way it captures a bygone era of New York. “It’s this great image of [Lower Manhattan] when it was still raw, you know, Wild West territory,” Stein says.
‘Downtown 81’ (shot in 1980-81, released in 2000), directed by Edo Bertoglio
The log line: Bertoglio’s film is a striking portrait of a young artist who needs to raise money so he can return to the apartment from which he’s been evicted.
The pitch: Jean-Michel Basquiat stars as the artist in this snapshot of life in New York during the ’80s. Despite all the drama surrounding it — postproduction wasn’t completed until 20 years after filming, and for many years the movie was considered lost — the film is notable, says Stein, because “it’s got all the characters and all our buddies in it.”
These interviews have been edited and condensed.
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Theater
Quincy Tyler Bernstine
A master of active stillness, the 52-year-old Bernstine (imposing in the 2024 revival of John Patrick Shanley’s “Doubt,” above) has that great actorly gift of making thought visible. A natural leader onstage, she compels audiences to follow her.
Victoria Clark
One of the theater’s best singing actors, with Tonys for Adam Guettel and Craig Lucas’s “The Light in the Piazza” (2005) and David Lindsay-Abaire and Jeanine Tesori’s “Kimberly Akimbo” (above, 2022), Clark, 66, performs not on top of the notes but through them, delivering complicated characterization and gorgeous sound in each breath.
Susannah Flood
Flood, 43, is a true expert at confusion, a good thing because she often plays characters like the twisted-in-knots Lizzie in Bess Wohl’s “Liberation” (above, 2025). What makes that confusion thrilling is how she grounds it not in a lack of information or purpose but, just like real life, in an excess of both.
Jonathan Groff
The rare musical theater man with the unstoppable drive of a diva, Groff, 41, sweats charisma, as audience members in ringside seats at Warren Leight and Isaac Oliver’s Broadway musical “Just in Time” (above, 2025) recently discovered. Giving you everything, he makes you want more.
William Jackson Harper
Unmoored characters are often unsympathetic. But whether playing a confused doctor in the 2024 revival of Anton Chekhov’s “Uncle Vanya” or a delusional bookstore clerk in Eboni Booth’s “Primary Trust” (above, 2023), Harper, 46, makes vulnerability look easy, and hurt hard.
Joshua Henry
There are singers who blow the roof off theaters, but the 41-year-old Henry’s voice is so huge and deeply connected to universal feelings that he seems to be singing inside you. Currently starring in the Broadway revival of “Ragtime” (above, by Lynn Ahrens, Stephen Flaherty and Terrence McNally), he blows the roof off your head.
Mia Katigbak
Superb and acidic in almost any role — in distress (Annie Baker’s 2023 “Infinite Life,” above) or in command (2024’s “Uncle Vanya”) — Katigbak, 71, finds the sweet spot in even the sourest truths of the human condition.
Judy Kuhn
With detailed intelligence and specific intention informing everything she sings, Kuhn, 67, is (among other things) a Stephen Sondheim specialist — her take on Fosca in “Passion” (above, 2012) was almost literally wrenching. It requires intellectual stamina to keep up with the master word for word.
Laurie Metcalf
The fierce, sharp persona you may know from her years on “Roseanne” (1988-97) is about a tenth of the blistering commitment Metcalf, 70, offers onstage in works like Samuel D. Hunter’s “Little Bear Ridge Road” (above, 2025). She goes there, no matter the destination.
Deirdre O’Connell
For 40 years an Off Broadway treasure, O’Connell, 72, handles the most daring, out-there material — including, recently, a 12-minute monologue of cataclysmic gibberish in Caryl Churchill’s “Kill” (above, 2025) — as if it were as ordinary as barroom gossip.
Conrad Ricamora
Revealing the Buddy Holly in Benigno Aquino Jr. (in the 2023 Broadway production of David Byrne and Fatboy Slim’s “Here Lies Love”) or the queer wolf in Abraham Lincoln (in Cole Escola’s “Oh, Mary!,” above, last year), Ricamora, 47, is uniquely capable of great dignity and great silliness — and, wonderfully, both together.
Andrew Scott
It’s a tough competition, but Scott, 49, may have the thinnest skin of any actor. Whether he’s onstage (playing all the characters in Simon Stephens’s Off Broadway “Vanya,” above, in 2025) or on film, every emotion — especially rue — reads right through his translucence.
Michael Patrick Thornton
Some actors are hedgehogs, projecting one idea blazingly. Thornton, 47, is a fox, carefully hoarding ideas and motivations. Keeping you guessing as Jessica Chastain’s benefactor in the 2023 revival of Henrik Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House” or as a pathetic lackey in last year’s production of Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot” (above, center), he holds you in his thrall.
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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?
Here’s one way to make New York more affordable: triple your income. After moving from Baton Rouge, La., in 2016 to attend graduate school, Daniel Babin lived mostly on red beans and rice or homemade “slop pots,” renting rooms in what he called a “cult house” and a building on a block his girlfriend was afraid to visit.
Then, in January, he got a job as a geologist with a mineral exploration company, with a salary of $200,000, plus a $15,000 signing bonus. A new city suddenly opened up to him. “I can take a woman out on a $300 dinner date and not look at the check and not feel bad about it,” he said. He also now has health insurance.
Mr. Babin, 32, a marine geologist who also leads an acoustic string band, now navigates two economic worlds, one shaped to his postdoctoral income of $70,000 a year — when his idea of a date was a walk in Central Park — and the other reflecting his new income. In this world, he is shopping for a vintage Martin Dreadnought guitar, for which he will gladly drop $4,000.
Finding a New Base Line
On a recent morning at Mr. Babin’s home in Bushwick, Brooklyn, where he shares a 6,800-square-foot cohousing space with 17 roommates, he was still figuring out how to manage this split.
“I’m feeling less inclined to just let it rip than I was a few months ago,” he said of his spending habits. He socks away $1,500 from each paycheck, and has not moved to replace his 2003 Toyota Corolla, an “absolute dump” given to him by his father. “Hopefully, I’m returning a little bit to some kind of base-line lifestyle that I’ve established for myself over the last five years,” he continued. “Because the fear is lifestyle inflation. You don’t want to just make more money to spend more money. That’s not the point, right?”
Lightning Lofts, the cohousing space where Mr. Babin has lived since January 2024, bills itself as part of a “social wellness movement” and seeks to continue the ethos of Burning Man, the annual communal art and cultural festival in the Nevada desert.
For a room with an elevated loft bed and use of common areas, Mr. Babin pays $1,400 a month in rent, plus another $250 for utilities and weekly housecleaning.
He was first drawn to the organization through its events, including open mic “salons” where he played music or read from his science fiction writings. These were free or very cheap nights out, unpredictable and fascinating.
“You would see dance and tonal singing, and some dude wrote an algorithm that can auto-generate A.I. video based on what you’re saying — beautiful storytelling,” he said.
“So I just showed up every month, basically, until they let me live here.”
The room was a good deal. He had looked at a nearby building where the rent was $1,900 for a room in a basement apartment that flooded once a month. “Ridiculous,” he said.
But beyond its financial appeal, Mr. Babin liked the loft’s social life. “I used to be chronically lonely, and I just don’t feel lonely anymore,” he said. “Which is fantastic in a crazy place like New York. It’s so alive and it’s so isolating at the same time.”
Splurging on Ski Trips
Before Mr. Babin got his new job, he used to go to restaurants with friends and not eat, trying to save up $35 for a “burner” party — in the spirit of Burning Man — or Ecstatic Dance, a recurring substance-free dance party. He loved to ski but could not afford a hotel, so he would carry his old skis and beat-up boots to southern Vermont and back on the same day.
“Going on a hike is a pretty cheap hobby,” he said, recalling his money-saving measures. “Living without health insurance is a good one.”
He still appreciates a good hike, he said. But on a recent ski trip, he splurged on new $700 boots and another $300 worth of gear. “I’m like, this is something I’ve wanted for 10 years, so I deserve it,” he said.
He bought a $600 drone to take pictures for his social media accounts, and then promptly crashed it into the Caribbean (he’s now replacing the rotors in hopes of returning it to health).
He cut out the red beans and rice, he said, but his usual meal is still a modest $13 sandwich from the nearby bodega or $10 for pizza. “If I’m getting takeout and it’s less than $17, I don’t feel too bad about it,” he said.
A Future After Cohousing
A big change is that dating is much more comfortable now, and he feels more attractive as a marriage prospect. “It turns out that a lot more people pay attention to you if you offer them dinner instead of a walk in the park,” he said.
He is now thinking of leaving the cohousing space — not just because he can afford to, but because his work has kept him from joining house events, like the regular potluck dinners. “I sometimes feel like a bad roommate, because part of being here is participating,” he said. “I feel like there might be someone who would enjoy the community aspect more than I’m capable of contributing right now.”
He sounds almost wistful in discussing his former economizing. If it weren’t for the dating issue, he said, he would not need the higher income or lifestyle upgrades. “I never really felt like I was compromising on what I wanted to do,” he said.
He paused. “It’s just that what I was comfortable with has changed a little bit.”
We are talking to New Yorkers about how they spend, splurge and save.
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