[yawpitch]

You’re only surprised because you haven’t spent enough time watching pigeons. They’re beautiful birds, many past societies literally worshipped them, and they saved a lot of butts in both World Wars. They’ve fallen from grace because 20th century plus humans don’t like what survives and thrives wild in their cities, especially when they associate them with dirt and garbage the humans leave everywhere.

[hollerith]

I've spent plenty of time around pigeons. They've nested a few times within 20 of feet of my apartment.

If I don't use adequate protective equipment while cleaning the pigeon shit from my patio, I can be infected with an organism in the shit, namely, Histoplasma capsulatum, Cryptococcus neoformans, Aspergillus fumigatus, Chlamydophila psittaci, Salmonella bacteria, Escherichia coli, Mycobacterium avium complex, Listeria monocytogenes, West Nile virus, St. Louis Encephalitis virus or Eastern Equine Encephalitis virus.

[yawpitch]

Most of those you have any realistic chance of catching from a wild bird you can also get — and are vastly more likely to get during your lifetime — via the fecal-oral route from another human. Indeed many of those are only a risk at all with pigeons because they live near humans who expose them to filth they’d never encounter in the wild.

Oh, and several of those you can’t get at all from a pigeon’s poop, they require an intervening, blood-feeding arthropod.

[hollerith]

>several of those you can’t get at all from a pigeon’s poop, they require an intervening, blood-feeding arthropod.

"A mosquito is needed to transfer the virus from the pigeon to me," is not a great defense of pigeons because of how common mosquitoes are and how hard it is to get rid of them.

[yawpitch]

Sure, mosquitoes have, historically, earned your ire, but now you’re blaming the pigeon, again, for a disease you’re just as or more likely to get from another, very likely human, source.

Which is especially true when you realize that most mosquito species that have adapted to blood feed off avians don’t also tend to blood feed off mammals.

And, not for nothing, but what I was refuting was the idea you needed safety gear around pigeon poop to defend you from blood-borne viruses that aren’t known to transfer via that poop.