Public outcry and opposition following news on July 10 that a chemical extermination was planned in an attempt to rid the Acme shopping center of the English sparrows nesting in the canopy and roof above the stores has resulted in a change of heart.##M:[more]##
Many area residents, including 17-year-old High School North student Lauren Mandel, were so upset upon finding out about the extermination, they turned up at the center to voice their concerns and to sign a petition organized by Mandel and a couple of her friends.
“Just the idea of them poisoning the birds because they thought they were a nuisance disgusted me,” said Mandel. “I decided something had to be done.”
The shopping center’s management company, Penn Windsor Plaza LLC/McDowell, planned to use chemicals to rid the center’s roof of the birds after shoppers began complaining about their droppings.
According to Jill Swanson, the township’s environmental health specialist, complaints by residents to township officials started accumulating in May.
Bob Hary, the township’s health officer, said the complaints centered around the nuisance of having the birds flying around above patrons as they walk into the store and that their droppings created a risk to public health. Township health officials went out to check for themselves to see if the complaint was valid, and “in this case, it was,” Hary said.
Township officials were required to notify the management company through mail notices and phone calls, which Hary says they did. But, “when we notice a public issue, the only thing we can do, and the only thing we should do, is advise them to abate the nuisance and to do it legally,” Hary said. As for how the property owner decides to go about doing it, “we don’t have the authority to tell them how to do it.”
“If we suggest to them how to correct a problem, and it doesn’t work, then we have a liability,” Hary explained. “We never tell a property owner how to abate the nuisance.”
He did say township officials discussed various options and methods for getting rid of the birds, other than poisoning, but that was the option the company chose.
However, shortly following the public outcry, the management company halted its plans to follow through with the poisoning on July 10, and instead, decided to look into alternative methods.
Part of the reason was the amount of public attention drawn to the issue. Mandel says she created a Facebook.com group called Save Our Sparrows, and so far, over 50 people have joined.
From 10 a.m. to 3 p.m., she and her two friends, Bridget Riley and Alecia Bardachino, both 16 and also students at North, along with Mandel’s mother, Andrea, canvassed the shopping center, collecting signatures and talking to residents.
“What we’re saying was not that they shouldn’t do something about their sparrow problem,” says Mandel. “We realize it has some detriment to their health, but we think they should carry out their solution in a more human way. We were saying they should put netting on the roof so the sparrows wouldn’t nest there.”
The alternative strategy of placing wiring in the areas where the birds nest to keep them out — which officials now say is the method the management company will implement — is already in use at the Rite Aid in the same shopping center, and Mandel says that method appears to have been successful in preventing the sparrows and their droppings.
Swanson says that the management company has since contracted with a company that will begin work on July 28 that does not include poisoning the birds. Says Swanson: “They are going to take any baby birds that are still there to a rescue group, and clean it out, and then put wire mesh in the opening, which would prevent the birds from making future nests.”
