At nine o’clock on Saturday morning, Norwich market is only just stirring: shutters are still down and the aisles are quiet. In the nearby Memorial Gardens, however, a large crowd has already gathered: the market’s pigeons are waiting to be fed.
Jenny Coupland arrives on the scene a little later than her usual hour, with a backpack brimming with seed. As she begins doling it out, the birds descend from their perches and cover the ground, pecking furiously. The sun catches their bobbing heads, sending iridescent shimmers across their brown and grey feathers.
A few passersby stop to watch; one takes a photo. The sheer number of birds is a spectacle – not to mention startling, when they all abruptly take flight. “They’re a bit jumpy today,” says Coupland, 43. Judging by the wary glances she shoots at the onlookers, she’s not just referring to the birds.
As the founder of the avian welfare group Peck Savers, Coupland has been feeding pigeons around Norwich for 10 years, but in recent months, she says, it has become “a tinderbox situation”.
View image in fullscreen ‘I think they’re a damned nuisance’ … Eddie Graci. Photograph: Joshua Bright/The Guardian
Over the past year, the flock here has swelled to about 300 pigeons, causing an increasing number of complaints from shoppers and traders. “I think they’re a damned nuisance, that’s my opinion,” says Eddie Graci from Horsford, who I find nursing a mug of tea at the picnic tables on the fringe of the market. He has seen the birds taking over these tables, trying to pinch chips, defecating on people’s clothing. And the Memorial Gardens, Graci adds, are a “damn mess. There’s bird droppings everywhere.”
National media have described scenes here as Hitchcockian. Norwich city council has come up with various solutions, including sending a Harris’s hawk over the market to scare the pigeons off and feeding the flock contraceptives. But giving birds contraceptives, it turns out, isn’t actually licensed in the UK and the four-week hawk pilot was put on h
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