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SCMP Reporter

If you enjoy feeding pigeons, you had better watch out: it might not be illegal, but it could cost you.

Although it is not illegal to feed pigeons, the Food and Environmental Hygiene Department warned yesterday that it would be an offence if feeding led to 'a littering act' in public areas. In this case, offenders will be fined just like any other litterers and must pay $600, or $1,500 from next Thursday.

The issue came to light on Thursday when a group of Kennedy Town residents met several government departments to discuss hygiene problems created by about 100 pigeons in their community.

They said they had been breeding rapidly around an open area in Kwun Lung Lau  thanks to the generosity of some residents who fed them daily.

The department spokeswoman said it depended on the situation, but inspectors might well fine these 'litterers'.

'If one feeds from the hand and nothing falls on the ground, it is not littering,' she said.

'But if you were to drop biscuits, bread and the like into a paper container on the ground, and the birds were to finish it all, leaving the container there, then it would be littering,' she said.

Pressed further on the question of whether unfinished bird food constituted litter, the spokeswoman said the spirit of the law was to maintain public hygiene. 'If everyone feeds the pigeons with biscuits that they cannot finish, then the streets will be really dirty,' she said.

Despite such warnings, many people - children, the middle-aged and elderly alike - had been coming to feed the birds regularly in the afternoon with rice, vegetables, bird food and even their own left-overs, said Chan Kwok-kwong, a resident of nearby Smithfield Terrace.

Some elderly people, worried about the birds starving, even cried when district council members told them to stop feeding the birds, he said.

But such emotional displays failed to sway him.

'This is in itself a dumping act,' Mr Chan said. 'How can you ensure that the pigeons finish 100 per cent of the food? Some people just left the containers there after feeding.'

What really made him angry, Mr Chan said, was waste of a different kind: the pigeons had been nesting on top of air-conditioners, and their droppings had fallen on to clothes being hung out to dry.

'We fear - and especially during Sars - that germs from their waste and feathers could be carried indoors through the air-conditioning,' he said.

Eric Tai Hing-fung, a veterinary officer from the Agriculture, Fisheries and Conservation Department, urged residents not to feed pigeons so they would naturally migrate to the country parks.



Littering semantics stir up pigeon-feeding palaver