“In the name of the fauna, the sun and the holy, innocence of nature, stop the pigeon poachers,” read one sign. “Shut down Pigeons on Broadway!” read another. The crowd was gathered around Pigeons on Broadway: pet supply store and cultural enclave for the city’s practitioners of the declining art of pigeon-keeping. “I take care of them like I took care of my kids,” pigeon collector Micheal Scott told a curious New York Times some years ago.

“Micheal Scott is an animal abuser,” some ten or twenty people were chanting Saturday afternoon, outside of Pigeons on Broadway, which Scott runs with his brother Joey. A line of seven cops were now standing in front of the building, keeping protesters away from the entrance to the store. Things had changed for the pair, who bought the building after inheriting both real estate and a flock of pigeons belonging to their late grandfather, who had maintained some hundreds of birds on a rooftop in Canarsie. 

Deciding to move their wares northward, toward the corners of the Bushwick border would eventually put them in the crosshairs of Tina Piña Trachtenberg, a local fixture who goes by the name Mother Pigeon, wears a felt pigeon costume and maintains a flock of pigeons, largely on warm afternoons in and around Maria Hernandez Park. She also makes her own life-sized pigeons, out of felt, and sells these for about $85 a pop. For some time, Trachtenberg has been maintaining, very publicly, that the Scotts have been selling pigeons to not very great people. Hunters, over in Pennsylvania, who throw pigeons up in the air and kill them for sport; this is the image Trachtenberg conveys. A woman who buys them for religious rituals, a hunting club in Connecticut that uses them to train its dogs, still others who would rather not say what they’re using them for reads an anecdotal report of the Scotts’ customers in the Times. Since Trachtenberg first showed up last month, also outside Pigeons on Broadway, reports followed in the Post; in Brooklyn Magazine; a report penned by a self-confessed avid pigeon watcher appeared in the New York Groove; in the Times again, where a headline writer visibly strained to connect Trachtenberg’s protesting to the arrest of a purportedly unrelated man caught last month allegedly smuggling pigeons in Tompkins Square Parks: Mother Pigeon Thought She Knew. 

“One jailbird getting caught doesn’t mean Michael Scott is off the hook. His whole operation is still out there, and we see it for what it is,” Trachtenberg says online. Her latest protest had attracted, this time, a Post reporter and a blogger with a consumer-grade DSLR. More notably, this run also attracted a film crew of college students, who moved around the protest with large cameras and an enormous boom mike. It’s for a documentary. About all this.

“Street birds are different then the birds that we carry. I got three thousand birds on my roof. Three thousand. I breed them,” one of the Scotts was telling the crowd. 

The brothers had assembled their own “counter-protest,” consisting largely of offering slices of pizza and signs they had made. Pigeons for Miles is scamming money for her own purpose. She is not using the money for pigeons or any other animals [.] She cannot show approved or one receipt of what she’s done to help these animals. Another read, in part, You’re a wicked woman.

Some took them up on this. A short woman with burgundy colored hair would occasionally yell at the protesters; another Pigeons longtimer, a rotund and middle-aged man, would sometimes take to aggressively shaking a box of pigeons at them. Another was telling the Post reporter that his pigeon collection was a source of great, personal pride and had helped him out in hard times. At one point, an old man walked out, a pigeon perched delicately on his hat.

“You’re going to burn in hell for the rest of eternity,” swore Megan Walton, who operates “Pigeons for Miles,” at the end of a profane tirade aimed at one of the Scotts. Walton runs a small pigeon sanctuary in Putnam County which she runs as a nonprofit. 

In a video posted later that night on the “Pigeons for Miles” instagram page, Walton went on: “I think anger is a very valid emotion when it comes to speaking up for victims, speaking up for the oppressed who can’t speak up for themselves. People who want to downplay these atrocities will point to that anger as the problem, instead of the reason that people are angry. If you’re paying attention, you’re angry, whether it’s about this or about the big things that matter, like Palestine.”

Pigeons on Broadway is located at 1622A Broadway.

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Photos taken by Andrew Karpan.