UPDATE: With Tinseled Trees, the Capitol Hill Bird Battle Is Over, for Now
In August, Jennifer Smira watched as birds made their nightly roost over the rooftops of Potomac Avenue. Soon after, the birds began to leave.
(By Bill O'leary -- The Washington Post)
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The birds are gone.
In their place, along the 1600 block of Potomac Avenue SE, are tree after tree strung with slews of silver streamers -- a sort of early Christmas tinseled look.
"Disco Lane," resident Jennifer Smira calls her block now.
But it's better than the hoards of roosting starlings, who spent the whole summer in the publicly owned trees that line her block. Their droppings whitewashed the sidewalks, clumped to the lids and handles of trash cans, dotted front fences and made it so that every time Smira walked her dog, she had to clean its paws with baby wipes before they returned inside.
Pleas to public agencies went largely unanswered. Those who tried to get an answer -- or a solution -- were met mostly with stall tactics and a procession of fingers that pointed at other agencies, residents said.
After publicity about the residents' plight, three firetrucks sprayed the trees with water, Smira said. One firefighter voluntarily brought his own pressure washer, she said, and cleaned the slimy white bird droppings from the sidewalks, fences and front yards.
The residue, "just months of glue," Smira said, was blasted away. Now, along the sidewalk, you can see a bright, clean trail along where the good Samaritan and his pressure washer did their work.
In late August and early September, the birds started to leave of their own accord. "But I didn't want to break it to everybody" -- everybody being officials from city government and its agencies -- "because they were starting to show that they care," Smira said.
Officials had discerned the cause of the greater-than-normal numbers of starlings along the block, which leads to Congressional Cemetery. There, a "huge infestation," as resident Aimee Mavragis called it, of Japanese beetles had taken up residence, and the birds were feasting all day, every day, in the cemetery, then returning to Potomac Avenue at sunset.
People from the Health Department arrived with silver, reflective streamers and, using cherry pickers from the Transportation Department, "tinsel-decorated all the trees on Potomac Avenue," Smira said.
The birds, Smira repeated, "were already gone. Let's just be blunt. But [city officials] were showing that they cared, and everyone on the block really appreciated it."
D.C. Council member Tommy Wells (D-Ward 6) held a living room meeting at Smira's home to discuss what steps they'd take in May, when the starlings return, as they've done every year for the last many years.
