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Feature: Falcons rule the roost at Wimbledon

Wayne Davis is pictured with Callisto, a peregrine falcon used to scare away pigeons, at the All-England Lawn Tennis Club in Wimbledon, England, on Thursday. PHOTO: NY TIMES IMAGES

Thanks to Wayne Davis and his fine-feathered friends, raindrops are the only thing that Wimbledon fans have to worry about dropping from the sky and into their bowls of strawberries and cream.

The All England Club would seem a wonderful place to be a pigeon. There are nooks, crannies and overhangs. There are trees and grass. And, for two weeks out of the year, there is litter and food and people to hassle, which seems to be what pigeons do best.

But there are no pigeons here, apart from the occasional wayward straggler.

Davis stood on the terrace atop the Broadcast Center, several stories high, about even with the top of Center Court. From there you could see the tennis courts below, the suburbs that surround them, and downtown London in the distance.

And, above, was one of his Peregrine falcons, circling the sky, issuing a silent warning that being a pigeon and being here is not a good idea.

Davis swung a rope like a lasso. At its end was a meaty piece of quail attached to a leather lure. The falcon, this one named Callisto, dived toward the food and swooped past, like a bull to a matador. After a few passes, Davis dropped the decoy to his feet, and the brown falcon with a speckled chest came down to earth and feasted.

"I've been doing this 25 years," said Davis, smiling at the spectacle of the bird's flight.

For years pigeons flocked to Wimbledon's grass courts. They would eat the grass seed in the spring and nest under the Center Court roof. Every year, workers would try to remove the nests before the tournament. Still, the pigeons would flutter about the courts, and bomb the fans with unpleasant surprises.

"In the old, old days, they probably used to shoot them," Wimbledon spokesman Johnny Perkins said of the pigeons. "But in these touchy feely times, they probably decided that wasn't the best option. This seems to be the best compromise, really."

Helping Wimbledon limit its spectators to ticket-holding humans was the idea of Davis' wife. She was watching the tournament on television a few years ago, and saw players shooing pigeons with rackets. So Davis called the All England Club and offered a demonstration of his services. The club liked what it saw, and Davis was hired beginning in 1999.

Davis owns a company called Avian Control Systems. With his small flock of hawks, falcons and owls, he shoos other birds using little more than fright tactics. Lesser birds see his birds soaring around, and they find somewhere else to go.

"Falconer," Davis said, chewing on a suggestion for his job title. "I like that. I get called bird man, but falconer is nice, isn't it?"

Davis does much of his work at airports and military airfields, where geese, gulls and other unsuspecting birds can pose safety risks if they find their way into jet engines.

Other clients see birds as a nuisance, not a danger. Davis has contracts with Westminster Abbey and Canary Wharf, a glass-and-steel business district along the Thames. Like the All England Club, they wanted a non-messy way to get rid of the mess-making birds, particularly the feral pigeon.

Pigeons, it seems, have memories that last at least a couple of days. At Wimbledon, Davis and his birds come a few times a week, throughout the year. That is enough to keep them from roosting in the rafters of the show courts and from eating the grass seed when it is planted in the spring across nearly 40 courts.

"It's analogous to cleaning," he said. "You solve the problem with an intensive period, and keep it up with maintenance."
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