When Brookline ordered him to get rid of his pet pigeons last year, Edwin Alexanderian begrudgingly dismantled two coops in his backyard and took about 100 of the birds to New Hampshire to release them.
.jpg)
The birds have been ruffling feathers of neighbors, who say that hundreds…
Within days, said Alexanderian, who is president of Brookline’s Town Meeting Members Association, the pigeons had found their way back to his Hammond Street home in Chestnut Hill.
The birds have been ruffling feathers of neighbors, who say that hundreds of pigeons flock around Alexanderian’s property, and regularly defecate on their rooftops, porches, and patios.
After months of complaints by neighborhood residents, the town’s Health Department recently filed criminal nuisance charges against Alexanderian.
“The poor neighbors have been suffering,’’ said Pat Maloney, Brookline’s chief environmental health inspector.
Maloney said the Health Department has charged Alexanderian with failing to eliminate a public health nuisance, maintaining a dwelling that is a nuisance, and keeping pigeons without a permit.
Alexanderian, 50, is scheduled for arraignment on the charges Wednesday in Brookline District Court.
“Of course I’m not guilty,’’ he said in a telephone interview last week. “I don’t have any pigeons. I got rid of the coops.’’
A native of Iran, Alexanderian said pigeons are considered pets in his homeland, and he had set up the coops at his home for birds that he nursed back to health after they had been injured or poisoned in the urban setting.
But Alexanderian never obtained the special permits he needed to build coops and keep pigeons in his residential neighborhood, Brookline officials said.
In January 2010, the town’s Zoning Board of Appeals rejected Alexanderian’s request for a variance that would have allowed him to keep the coops.
He then took down the roosting cages and tried to turn the pigeons loose, Alexanderian said, but they returned to his house, answering the call of their homing instinct, he said.
And when his former pigeons returned, Alexanderian added, they brought other birds with them.
But the pigeons do not flock just to Alexanderian’s home.
Maggie Noel, a 39-year-old resident of neighboring Hammond Pond Parkway, said that since last fall, hundreds of the birds have been perching on the rooftop of her home or those of her neighbors almost every day.
“It’s a nightmare,’’ Noel said. “There is excrement everywhere. I was calling the town all of the time.’’
Noel said she believes Alexanderian has been feeding the birds, and added that if he wants to keep pigeons for pets he should not do it in a residential area.
“That is not fair,’’ she said. “That is not a nice thing to do.’’
While noting that there is no law against feeding birds, Alexanderian said that he has not been feeding the pigeons. They are simply eating the organic fertilizer he uses on his lawn, he said.
Maloney said Brookline’s health officials want Alexanderian to trap the birds and take them elsewhere to be released.
But Alexanderian said that the birds will simply return again, because they believe his property is their home.
He said the charges against him are “a wild goose chase’’ that town officials are pursuing because he plans to run for a seat on the Board of Selectmen.
He also said he will not be pushed around.
“It’s not going to happen,’’ Alexanderian said. “My skin is like a rhinoceros.’’
Source: Boston.com
