Guano-be-gone: TARTA looking to evict seagull squatters from bus garage roof
Transit authority leaders say flock numbering more than 1,000 birds poses ‘sanitation and safety issue.’
By David Patch / The Blade
Sat, 23 May 2020 18:16:37 GMT
link -- with images
Who put fifty tons of [poop] on the foreign office roof?
Who suffers from nine known diseases?
Who gets up in the morning when the sun comes up and makes their beds,
Paper clips, bus tickets all around their heads?
The British progressive-rock band Genesis wrote these lyrics to describe pigeons in London’s Trafalgar Square, but change “foreign office” to “transit garage” and their song could just as easily describe what’s been happening with seagulls at the Toledo Area Regional Transit Authority’s headquarters on Central Avenue.
And with guano not only fouling the solar panels TARTA recently installed on its garage’s roof and dropping daily on employee vehicles in the parking lot, but also posing a hazard to get into the building’s ventilation system, the transit authority is prepared to spend up to $75,000 to try to evict the seagull legions that have made the building their home.
Daniel Woodcock, president of TARTA’s board of trustees, told fellow board members Thursday that the rooftop flock numbers more than 1,000, posing a significant “sanitation and safety issue.”
Stacey Clink, the agency’s finance director, said staff have been looking into several federally approved remedies provided by qualified specialists. Seagulls are listed by the federal Centers for Disease Control as a disease vector, and they can also become very aggressive toward people when they have young in their nests, she said.
“It’s of utmost importance that we do it now, because there are hundreds of eggs on the roof that will hatch late next month,” Ms. Clink said.
The most promising solution, she said, is to install a grid of wires on the roof that would make it an unsuitable landing zone for the birds without entangling them.
“They [the wires] just create a threatening environment the seagulls would avoid,” the finance director said.
A laser-beam array is another possibility, she said, although in applications elsewhere it doesn’t seem to have been as effective.
The eggs, meanwhile, will be coated with oil so they don’t hatch.
“It’s important for us to do this in a humane manner,” said Kimberly Dunham, the transit authority’s general manager.
Ms. Dunham playfully denied having brought the seagulls with her when she left her previous job in Connecticut late last year to become TARTA’s top administrator, and previous TARTA leadership did arrange for gull eggs on the roof oiled at least once in the past.
Addressing the problem now, she said, is driven largely by employee complaints.
Carly Allen, president and business manager of Amalgamated Transit Union Local 697, said she’s “typically an animal advocate,” but in this case has to look out for her union members’ health and safety first.
“It’s going to be a literal breath of fresh air when they remediate that problem,” Ms. Allen said after the board meeting Thursday. “...When you go into respiratory risk in the workplace, I have to go on the line of safety.”