BART hired Pac-Man the hawk — pigeons halved in a week without touching a nest

NPR reported in July 2022 that BART had hired Falcon Force, a pest abatement company, to fly Pac-Man — a roughly 6-year-old, 1.5-pound Harris's hawk — at its El Cerrito del Norte station in the San Francisco suburbs, where riders returning after the pandemic had complained about pigeons. 'Pretty much wherever you could perch, there was a pigeon,' falconer Ricky Ortiz said of the first visit. The station's ledges, signs, platforms and piping conduits made ideal pigeon habitat, and each bird can raise up to six clutches of two per year.

BART had tried the standard toolkit over the years — bird-repellent spikes, netting, owl statues, noise experiments — with no lasting success. Pac-Man's job was not to kill pigeons but to prevent nesting: he flies, the pigeons scatter, and the station reads as predator territory. He and Ortiz worked three eight-hour days a week at the largely open-air station.

The results came fast: after about a week, Ortiz saw roughly half as many pigeons, and the duo's patrols were soon just maintenance against a few holdouts. BART spokesperson Chris Filippi: 'What we have here is a really new approach that's only been around for a couple of months now, and it's been highly effective. We're really impressed with the impact it's having.'

Don't remove the pigeons — fly a predator. The hawk never has to catch anything; the pigeons' own instinct does the evicting

It replaces failed hardware with biology: spikes and statues are static, but a live raptor trips the predator-prey instinct no decoy can fake.

The mechanism is self-sustaining — a few patrol days keep the station marked as unsafe for nesting, without trapping, poisoning or cleanup escalation.

It answers the riders' complaint without the health hazard of carcasses or droppings from lethal control, since the pigeons simply leave.

Pigeons are a moving-target problem (six clutches a year), so a recurring presence matches the threat's reproductive math better than one-off removals.

When deterrent hardware keeps failing, borrow the opponent's own fear: a live threat exploits instincts that plastic owls and spikes can never trigger.

Two months in, the programme was still new but BART called it highly effective, with patrols reduced to chasing the few pigeons still willing to visit. The hawk's profile — quail-loving, socally minded, named after a video game character — also gave the transit agency a story riders could follow, alongside the measurable drop in birds.