A light rail station in a San Francisco suburb had a nasty problem: pigeon poop. The solution: a trained hawk scares the pigeons away. Commuters now treat the hawk and his handler like celebrities.

Transcript

STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:

Public transit systems face a lot of challenges, from delays to birds. The El Cerrito del Norte BART station, which is across the bay from San Francisco, was full of pigeons - and pigeon poop. Ricky Ortiz says it wasn't good.

RICKY ORTIZ: Pretty much wherever you could perch, there was a pigeon up on the platform, on the ledges.

INSKEEP: Ortiz is a falconer with a pest abatement company called Falcon Force, and his bird of prey works there, too.

ORTIZ: This is Pac-Man. He's a Harris Hawk, and he is native to the southwest - Arizona, New Mexico, Texas.

INSKEEP: Ortiz patrols the station and the platforms with Pac-Man in the skies above. Ortiz says just the presence of a predator is enough to keep the pigeons in line.

ORTIZ: Pigeons naturally are a prey species, so they already have a natural instinct of fear built into them when they see a predator in the area, especially a hawk.

INSKEEP: And Pac-Man watches that BART station like a hawk.

ORTIZ: Oh, he sees something over there.

(SOUNDBITE OF WHISTLE)

INSKEEP: As our producer watched, a rogue pigeon caught the hawk's eye, and he launched himself off Ortiz's gloved wrist and soared.

ORTIZ: So the pigeons just all scatter. There was a group of them on the roof, and he said, not in my town (laughter).

(SOUNDBITE OF BIRDS CAWING)

INSKEEP: A murder of crows flapped over to watch, and a squabble of seagulls heckled from the parking lot lampposts. Tim Gibson (ph) watched from the southbound platform, enthralled.

TIM GIBSON: Man, he's beautiful.

ORTIZ: Thank you.

GIBSON: I love my birds. You know, I've gone places where I see them in the wild. I do the binoculars, and I take a look at them. I try and identify the birds by - I study them.

INSKEEP: Mr. Gibson found the birds so interesting he missed his train. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.