Cecil Pitts is fighting with the city over his right to feed pigeons in his yard in South Ozone Park, Queens. He was fined after neighbors complained.
Never once in his 65 years did Cecil Pitts imagine that his life would be upended by pigeons, or that his love of them would land him in court, facing off against the City of New York.
Mr. Pitts lives alone in South Ozone Park, Queens, in a modest three-story house on Inwood Street that is filled with five decades’ worth of clutter left by relatives, nearly all of whom are now dead. For companionship, he has two big dogs, Lady and Tecumseh, who are both 12 and move creakily. Another dog, Sonny, died last year. Mr. Pitts keeps a Christmas photo of the three dogs, romping in the snow, in his musty, cramped living room. “Happy Holidays 2003,” reads the photo caption, “from Lady, Tecumseh and Sonny Pitts.”
Mr. Pitts loves jazz, keeps a vinyl record collection and is newly enthralled by Diana Krall. He also, to his neighbors’ apparent consternation, loves pigeons.
Every day, starting at sunup, Mr. Pitts feeds a small flock that gathers in his backyard. He scatters seed from an old plastic bucket that he keeps in his kitchen opposite his mother’s china and some yellow potatoes that have sprouted eyes.
Mr. Pitts figures that he spends about $10 a week for a 20-pound bag of birdseed that he gets from the Wal-Mart at Green Acres Mall in nearby Valley Stream. He began feeding the pigeons, he said, when he was a boy, after his family moved to South Ozone Park from Manhattan, in 1950. Back then, he said, Inwood Street was a dirt road.
No one had ever complained about the pigeon feeding, he said. Not when he was child, or when he visited over the years, and not when he moved back for good in 1987 to care for his mother, Vera, who died in 2004.
“They are my whole life, because all my relatives are gone,” he said of his dogs and the pigeons.
(Mr. Pitts said that his younger brother, William Pitts, lives in Port Charlotte, Fla., but that they do not keep in touch.)
Then, last fall, an inspector from the health department showed up at Mr. Pitts’s door. He told Mr. Pitts that he wanted to check the yard for pigeons (the city later confirmed that a neighbor had called 311 to complain). Mr. Pitts was cited for failing to show proof that one of his dogs had been vaccinated for rabies, and for causing a nuisance by feeding pigeons. In his report, the inspector wrote that there were at least 150 pigeons in Mr. Pitts’s backyard and another 25 to 30 on the roof. “Excessive pigeon droppings noted,” the inspector wrote, adding that the droppings were in Mr. Pitts’s and the neighbors’ yards.
Pigeons at a bird feeder in Cecil Pitts’s backyard in Queens. After he was fined over the pigeon feeding, Mr. Pitts sued the city.
Mr. Pitts said he was bewildered, and scared. The notice said he could be fined “not more than $2,000” for each violation. Mr. Pitts, who has worked as a hot dog vendor and a cabdriver, said he lived on $450 a month from Social Security.
On Oct. 22, he rode the E train to downtown Manhattan, to the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, for his scheduled appearance before a judge. The subway alone unnerved him; the last time he rode it, he used tokens and it cost $1.25 per ride.
Mr. Pitts learned that he was facing $500 in fines. He feared, unrealistically, that he would lose his house if he failed to pay, or be put in jail. He never knew, he said, that it was against the law to feed pigeons in his backyard.
“It hit me very, very hard,” Mr. Pitts said. “I didn’t intend to pay the fine. And if I was incarcerated, my dogs would die.”
Mr. Pitts decided that the only way to avoid the fine was to sue the city to have it waived. And so he did, representing himself because he could not afford a lawyer. In the suit, he claimed that he was not warned of the inspection, that the inspector trespassed without a court document, and that the number of pigeons was overstated.
Justice Charles J. Markey of State Supreme Court in Queens reviewed the case. And in an interim decision that froze the penalties and defined the legal issues, he wrote that Mr. Pitts’s case brought up “interesting issues of public health safety,” namely whether feeding pigeons on private property could be against the law. Mr. Pitts’s next court appearance is scheduled for April 3.
The city, for its part, says that while feeding pigeons is not illegal, feeding them to the point that they are “dropping” excessively might be.
“Generally, at times, a nuisance is something that is legal but taken to excess,” said Gabriel Taussig, the city’s lawyer in the case. “Clearly, people have bird feeders in their backyard. And that’s not a nuisance. However, when you start feeding in excess, so there’s a level of bird droppings that’s unhealthy, it rises to the level of nuisance.”
Mr. Taussig said he had never heard of private pigeon feeding being the subject of a city’s court case, though the health department said it issued hundreds of warning letters each year.
In a visit to Mr. Pitts’s neighborhood on Wednesday, one of his next-door neighbors, who would not give her name, said that her family had made no complaints against him, and that the droppings bothered them only in the summer. There was no answer at the house on the other side.
Meanwhile, at Mr. Pitts’s house, the droppings quotient in and around his backyard and driveway was indeed modest. Then again, it was a rainy day, though the weather did not stop Mr. Pitts from feeding the pigeons.
He dipped his hand into the seed container and headed outside. He filled a small feeder, went back inside for another fistful, and then scattered more seed under a small, low canopy, so the pigeons could be sheltered from the rain. A whoosh filled the air, and roughly three dozen pigeons swooped around him.
“We’re all God’s creatures,” Mr. Pitts said as he moved, slightly stooped, from his kitchen to his yard. “This is about me giving as much as I can to this world.”
