...every seven or eight minutes, during the daylight hours, a loud and unfamiliar dose of birdsong overwhelms the block for about forty seconds: wailing, whistling, screeching; one distinctly unpigeon-like call after the next, in rapid succession.

...Parks Department officials, acting at the request of the mall association, installed the speaker two months ago, in an attempt to ward off the pigeons. They bought it from a company called Bird-X, and it is designed to project the sounds of various predators. It is the first and only such device in use in the city—an experiment. And perhaps it ought to remain that way.

Shortly after the elderly woman had departed, another woman, bundled up for a day outside, shuffled over, unzipped her jacket, and removed a plus-sized bag of Cheerios, which she then emptied, with a smile, on the patch of mostly bare ground behind the bench. Hundreds of pigeons descended, spilling over even into the path of northbound traffic. The woman began muttering in a foreign language and retreated to a bench across the street, in Verdi Square.

...Later, at dusk, a man named Greg Pappas passed by the mall on his way home. He paused below the Bird-X speaker. “It’s annoying, and it doesn’t work,” he said. “I live on the sixth floor over there, on Amsterdam, and I can hear that thing through my window all day.”

He went on, “The problem is, there’s this woman who comes here and feeds them, like, every day.” He turned and faced the dirt behind the bench. “And, whatever the pigeons don’t eat, the mice do. It’s disgusting—look, there’s hundreds of them.”