Officials with a Monroe County-based animal rehab center are looking to re-house hundreds of pigeons that were rescued from a Wilkes-Barre home this week.
"A lot of them are dehydrated and emaciated, [they have] external parasites, but all that's treatable, so we're treating them and getting them medically cleared and ready for adoption," Pocono Wildlife Rehabilitation and Education Center Executive Director Janine Tancredi said.
The agency said Wilkes-Barre Animal Control requested its help regarding "a sad and devastating hoarding situation" at a residence in the 100 block of Jones Street.
Wilkes-Barre City Health Director Henry Radulski said both sides of the double-block home at 101-103 Jones St. were affected, and the structure has been posted as unfit for human habitation. Most of the impact was at 103 Jones St.
The situation is under investigation by the department's humane officer, Radulski said Wednesday afternoon, and one person was displaced by the situation. That person's name has not been released.
Radulski said a humane officer received a complaint about an odor at the property and went to investigate. The resident allowed the officer in.
"Upon getting in there, she saw unsanitary conditions, a lack of water and a large number of pigeons," Radulski said of the officer. "And that's that's when she notified Pocono Wildlife, because they're specialists in birds like that.
Pocono Wildlife Rehabilitation volunteers spent hours inside the house Tuesday, where they encountered what Tancredi called "pretty horrific" conditions, with most of the birds being kept in "a fairly small bedroom with no food and no water."
"There were cats and inches of defecation on the floor, to the point where we were worried we were going to fall through to the first floor. It was that much damage to the floorboards. It was actually soft to walk on," she said.
An unspecified number of cats remained in the house Wednesday, Radulski said. Tancredi said later she understood there were 14 cats.
"We work in conjunction with the SPCA [and] they'll try and find places to take those cats," Radulski said. "That's the next step."
"The focus was on the pigeons, and it was such an enormous job," he said. "The next step will be to determine the welfare of the cats."
'I don't think this was done malevolently
Radulski said investigators are working to ensure the resident's well-being.
"If a place is unfit for human habitation, we try and make arrangements to find adequate housing for that person, depending on the situation," he said of the resident. "We try to get family members to see if they have any help. The [Area Agency on Aging] would be a possibility also."
Tancredi did not have further information about the resident, but described them as "a single elderly person who probably started off with a few [pigeons] and it just got out of control."
"I don't think this was done malevolently," she said.
"Pigeons breed year-round, so I think what happened is they probably started off with a few and then a few more, and a few more and a few more. And, you know, they just were interbreeding is my suspicion," Tancredi said.
"We have babies as well ... there were a ton of eggs all over the room. So my assumption is that they were probably just breeding and breeding and breeding," she added.
Seeking new homes for the pigeons
Pocono Wildlife Rehabilitation volunteers recovered over 300 birds from the home, Tancredi said, of which 12 had been euthanized as of Wednesday. Reached later Wednesday Tancredi said she was back at the house and more birds were found.
"Some of them had missing eyes, missing legs, broken legs, splayed legs. But that's not really a high number in the larger picture of how many were rescued," Tancredi said, noting that 318 are still alive.
Pigeons are considered domestic birds and can legally be kept as pets, she said.
The group says its goal is to have all of the birds adopted in the next two weeks, "as our focus needs to shift to the hundreds of babies (native wildlife) that we have in care."
Pocono Wildlife will not be adopting the birds to people who want them for meat, or to people who would want to use them for racing, its Facebook post says.
Nor will the agency "just release them" into the air.
"We hear this all the time … especially with pigeons. But here’s the truth, not every bird can simply be set free," the group wrote on its Facebook page.
"Pigeons aren’t just 'city birds.' They are incredibly intelligent animals with strong homing instincts," the post adds. "If released in the wrong place, they will desperately try to find their way home, often exhausting themselves or flying straight into danger."
People interested in adopting pigeons as pets are asked to text Tancredi at 267-266-1277.
"The pigeons will all require veterinarian evaluation, medication, mite and lice treatment -- all at a significant cost," the group's post said.
"We're always looking for donations and help. We've had a lot of help thus far on our social media page," Tancredi said.
She also had advice for preventing such incidents.
"I know the neighbor had reported that he thought this was going on for close to a decade because of the smell," Tancredi said. "The windows were covered with feces, so clearly people who were going by knew something was going on in there."
"So I guess the message I really want to get across is, if you think something's going on, speak up," she said.
