Pigeon-watching hotspots to see around town #10: Figueroa at 4th St. Underpass flock.

This flock is a delight to visit (for me, at least, because I'm training them). They are currently (October 2024) becoming trained on the clicker, for "come." One of the birds swooped down in front of me, just earlier, today, as I arrived. I was positioned in an unfamiliar place, for feeding's sake, so it was especially flattering that the bird recognized me by the clicker. 

Some of the pigeon flock at Figueroa at 4th St. Underpass. 

This flock is particularly charming for its resilience in the face of challenges. Several of the birds (much more than by averages of other flocks) have visible battle scars, in the form of deformed and swollen feet, from having string tied around their feet, by former trappers that frequented the area, although they're here no longer, I seem to notice. I'm not well-versed in trapping the pigeons, to save them from their plight, at this time. I just show up and feed them. You can check out some of their quaint and isolated behaviors (although fairly common fare, for pigeons; I just felt that they could be a control flock, eventually, in psychological terms, with their progress and development in mind, on account of their isolation) in some video footage I captured while socializing my deceased pigeon friend that I brought along, and wrote an article on, a couple of weeks ago, below. 

Here, you can see my pigeon friend is being investigated by one of the males in the Figueroa at 4th St. Underpass flock's regular members.

Regardless of being new to the place, my pigeon friend felt right at home with the new birds, and he took to some sharing of the same meal as the other birds, while we visited. 

This bird, (unnamed, so far) is one of the more charming of the flock. He had a broken leg happen to him, several months ago, and it hasn't quite healed properly, but he could potentially heal up and be just fine, some day. 

The location is fairly quiet, lately, and, as I noted, isolated, but it's ideal if you happen to show up with food for the birds, and you can spot them roosting on the light poles. They'll swoop down and accept food, if they spot you tossing some out, in many cases. If you have a clicker, that's even better, because they're becoming trained on clicker noises. 
 

Pigeon-watching hotspots to see around town #9: DTLA Flower at 9th Street Flock, at Starbucks

 This flock has been developing ever since the 7-11 moved in to town, just up the street. Although the birds perch and hang out in various small nooks along Flower, and sometimes, in front of Ralph's, today I observed the birds hanging out at the side of the Starbucks cafe, and I felt like this was the perfect location to start establishing a regular visiting spot, for the birds to come and congregate, for a meal. 

The 9th at Flower locale pigeon flock, in the spot that I fancy, next to the Starbucks cafe.

Another view of the pigeons, with the Starbucks in view. 

Pigeon-watching hotspots to see around town #2: The Pico Metro Station Parking Lot Refugee Flock

I don't get on (or off) on this Metro train station all that often, but recently, I spotted a refugee flock of pigeons hanging out, here, at the parking lot across the street. Since I was stocked up on bread (some of it was bread with butter), I knew that I couldn't let this flock of birds down; they hadn't always been here, and they may have been on their way in or out of town, to have gathered here. 

The DTLA Pico Metro Station parking lot, featuring a large flock of pigeons. 

Now, I know Downtown Los Angeles' various flocks of pigeons fairly well, to say the least.  I've been coming here to feed the birds, going on 7 years, now. I've spotted some pigeons here, in other recent trips, but nowhere near this many birds have I seen, in this location. It was a notable gathering. I wondered, "are they new? A transplant? (port)? They must be hungry, to be in an unfamiliar spot, gathered like this." I take it upon myself to make sure, (typically), that every bird I come across gets fed, but this was a notable challenge. Most flocks of birds aren't quite this large, in Downtown LA. 

In any case, these birds, some of them a localized flock, whom had been spotted perching atop the luxury highrise buildings across the street, potentially had an advantageous view of the terrain, while they perched, and they could have seen other nearby flocks that had been gathering in other micro-locales of DTLA. Pigeons are made for socialization - the more, the merrier, so to speak. When the flock flies off, sometimes it's a "high-flying" motive about them, where they swoop and swing around, in spirals and in circles, or in figure 8-style, for the sake of quickly drawing attention to themselves, high-flying, as it were, so that nearby and known perching flocks, of a different micro-locale, can catch them high-flying, as a signal of that something exciting is going on, around this commotion, such as meal time. The other nearby flocks would be the ones by the Olympic at Olive Shell Gas Station, the 26th Street / Orthopedic Institute "USC Dumpster Pigeons," and, also, perhaps, some birds from around 7th at Metro Station. There's a chance that these flocks had become neglected, and the newcomers wanted to try out this location, on account of so much foot traffic at the Pico Metro Station. I made sure to look out for this flock again, the next time I rode by, but they weren't there, so I'll have to figure out their schedule, and try to fit them in, sometimes, during the course of a week.

This flock would be an ideal one for sports fans to visit, being that L.A. Live, the Crypto.com Sports Arena, and the Convention Center are all very nearby attractions for pedestrians, which have frequent and regular events happening. 

The birds are a fairly standard flock of Downtown LA: they're not completely shy, and they know that some people will toss them food, if they're visible to passersby. 

The Pico Metro Station Refugee Pigeon Flock, enjoying a meal, on April 19th, 2024, at 3:43 p.m.

This flock would be a good one for people to patronize during the springtime (now) season, throughout summer and in to fall, I suppose, being that it's light out, and pigeons in this area will, most commonly, stay out until 6:30 p.m., while the sun is still out. I just recently found out that pigeons love peanuts 🥜, by the way, so that's a nice and convenient snack food to have on hand for them (or, if you hadn't prepared, beforehand, there's a CVS right across the street. 

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Some geotag hash-caching of my recent past week; it was eventful and productive. Get a feverish au jour arts and culture inspiration slight travel shopping destiniaton frenzy of a within-walking distance destinations: DTLA day trip!

I come to the Stanley Mosk Courthouse front sidewalk concrete slabs over on to of the Grand Park Hill, as a homeless person at night, and sometimes during the day, to charge my device, and also because there are several possible free Wi-Fi internet connections available. Kendall’s Brasserie WiFi internet connection is the most reliable source of internet availability in that particular area.

On this night I was once again prolific on my iPigeon iPad Air and I planned some events on social media such as to perhaps attract some novel introverted attention towards myself, in that I announced that I would be playing a Chill Trap and Futurebass Mix Link to my favorite YouTube LP Mix in this genre (2) on my iPad in the early morning hours after the LA Times Food Festival and Patina Restaurant Group Kendall’s Brasserie pedestrian crowds died down, since I had brought my USB-powered 11 watt Go Groove speakers from Fry’s Electronics with me and the Cross DJ app I would be using was a new program that I had tried out using only a few times, at this point, although I found it to be immediately user-friendly and I had pulled off many several successfully delightful mixes, mashups, scratches, and transitions with Cross DJ. The performance was fairly bitchazzschazty, as expected, since the location is typically monitored and broadcast by night as an au jour locals walkthrough destination on the mornings after some slight yet recursively social-engineering needs-to have had you depravity occurs as a wash-up demographic on these high shores of Grand Ave. A civic center downtown Los Angeles (DTLA) destination at the center of commerce, culture, and process server taskbearers on top of Bunker Hill. The Los Angeles Cathédral, named Our Lady of the Saints,is right up and across the street, and several magnet schools are within walking distance. Needless to say, it’s one of the most paparazzi TMZ places to be seen in downtown Los Angeles, as far as getting a good and fair mix of what truly constitutes DTLA as far as pedestrians-passers-by.

I also spent a few hours on my iPigeon.Institute home exhibition « Au Jour Pigeons » in getting the ink brush illustrations (buy art supplies at Raw Materials LA, they have a rewards program!) digitally archived as original remakes from digital photograph by hand to get the images as rich vectors with a history from the original paper on my iPigeon iPad Air by using Adobe Draw from Apple’s iOS iTunes App Store , which is a relatively simple program-as-concept, yet it is resolutely useful program beyond what it does, in and of itself. Combined with the Adobe Creative Cloud app, which integrates many aspects of ad hoc featuring and functionality of the other iOS app offerings within the Adobe suite of mobile programs. Adobe also offers the same app suite for the Google Android operating system in the Play Store. Apple’s latest offering of the 5th generation iPad is not only faster and cheaper, but also now allows users to make use of the Apple Pencil, which was previously only available for use on the iPad Pro. I made good use of the iPad Pro in action along with the Apple Pencil last year before my devices were stolen from me as a narcoleptic homeless person; a notable story during a time of au français personées développer to come, as I had recently encountered another young man as a washed-up DTLA narcoleptic. It had been a while since I had been laid upon true narcolepsy happenstance wherewithal. You can read about such similar occurrences; or perhaps much more delightfully, listen to them through iOS accessibility text-to-speech engine at various speeds, on one of my Tumblr blogs.