A southwestern Ontario city has passed a bylaw to regulate pigeon ownership and better track the birds as they try to deal with a poop problem.

Councillors in Brantford, Ont., approved the bylaw during a meeting on March 24, requiring pigeons to be banded and for the owners of pigeons to be registered.

But the executive secretary of the Canadian Racing Pigeon Union says pigeons and their owners are being wrongly blamed, describing the city’s decision as “very unfair.”

“I’m not sure how they’re trying to rectify the situation there,” Sue Wilshire told CBC Hamilton.

“To me, they almost put the onus onto the pigeons, and then the general public thinks, ‘oh, OK, they’re doing this to go after the pigeon owners,’ but that’s not going to rectify the problem because the problem is going to continue.” 

Wilshire said while “it always turns out to be pigeons that get the blame,” she is confident that the birds are innocent, because “it’s a fact that pigeons do not defecate” when they are in flight.

“I’ll defend the pigeons because pigeons don’t even drop when they fly … they don’t use the facilities when they’re flying, they’re not pooping or anything,” she said.

“They don’t, until they come down, that’s when they poop. They don’t [poop] midair, so there is a problem. Scientifically, they know this. 

“Even the bylaw officer at Brantford told this council that it wasn’t possible to be pigeons, yet they still felt a need to go ahead and do this bylaw for the pigeons, which I think is unfair. I really do,” Wilshire added.

Wilshire said it’s not uncommon whenever there’s an issue in any municipality with birds, that it automatically goes to the pigeons. She said this is because feral pigeons can be a nuisance.

“But you’re going to see the pigeons, they’re going to be roosting on your roof, they’re going to be on a nearby roof because that’s what feral pigeons are,” Wilshire said.

“You usually get like 10, 20 of them at a time. Like, you go downtown Toronto and they’d be hanging out in apartment buildings or in the park and that type of thing, so automatically people think, ‘oh, it’s the pigeons.'”

It is important to find out because …if it happens to be the Canadian goose, you have to try and figure a way to keep that in control.– Sue Wilshire,

In 2024, the City of Toronto ramped up efforts to control the number of pigeons in the city by setting up a feeder in the downtown core that contains birth control for the birds. It was the fifth one set up in the city as part of a pigeon population control pilot project launched in May 2022, which aims to reduce the pigeon population by 50 per cent annually. The city set up four other feeders on rooftops in 2022 and 2023.

Wilshire said the City of Brantford should have investigated a bit more to find out which birds are the source of their problem before taking such drastic action on pigeon owners.

“It is important to find out because …if it happens to be the Canadian goose, you have to try and figure a way to keep that in control, or  whatever other bird it is because, you know, there is avian flu that goes around with the birds,” she said.

‘Pigeons don’t do it as they fly’

David Wiedrick, director of bylaw compliance and security at the City of Brantford, said only a small number of complaints were received by the city about bird droppings — three in 2024 and three in 2025.

He said while people initially placed blame on racing pigeons, they are not the source of the problem.

“We had a complaint in one of our areas in Brantford that the pigeons were actually wrecking people’s outside activities by defecating as they exercised in the sky,” Wiedrick told CBC News.

“Pigeons get exercised twice a day and I guess when they’re flying in groups of 30, 40, people were thinking that they were the ones that were doing the damage to the property.”

He said a motion was introduced in council to have staff investigate how they could stop this from happening.  

“During my  research, I found out that pigeons cannot do that as they fly, they defecate before they take off, which makes them lighter and they can fly,” said Wiedrick.

Despite this, the city passed a bylaw requiring pigeon keepers to register so officials can contact them directly if issues arise, and Wiedrick said there are no plans to investigate the issue any further.

“Scientifically, it would have to be from a different bird if pigeons don’t do it as they fly. There’s many, many birds that do it as they fly but again they’re feral birds, these are pigeons that are owned by  racing associations,” Wiedrick said.  

“[The droppings are from] feral birds, it’s part of nature. So no, we’re not doing any more investigation into this.”