By Cormac Wolf, CHS Intern

Serving around 7,000 boardings per day, busy Capitol Hill Station faces its fair share of urban challenges. But riders worried about the station’s solutions to one cold hard fact of city life can hopefully rest easier.

The Capitol Hill Station pigeons are not being shipped off to slaughter.

Concern about Sound Transit’s pigeon traps at the station rose in recent weeks. A Reddit post in r/Seattle and r/pigeon prompted readers to contact CHS, asking about the agency’s Transit’s best pigeon practices in their never-ending hygiene war.

John Gallagher, Sound Transit spokesperson, made it clear that Sound Transit and its crews do not euthanize trapped pigeons. They are released at a site away from the station, though Gallagher said he did not know where.

Gallagher says the pigeons are trapped and released by Link Operations crews for safety reasons. Their droppings constitute a slipping hazard, and the birds themselves can spread disease (though risk of pigeon-related disease is rare).

Pigeons are a common problem in all urban spaces — the most popular control method is spikes, but New York City has found success with nets, which are noticeably absent from Capitol Hill Station. Areas of Hawaii and British Columbia have opted to put pigeons on birth control as a humane method of population management.

Sound Transit had been receiving a high rate of hygiene complaints across its trains and facilities. Since then the station has been cleaned — the iconic red vacuum has gone — though the stairs at the south station entrance are still dotted with pigeon droppings.

There are more serious health concerns to address, of course. CHS reported here on efforts to measure whether the traces of meth and fentanyl found on Seattle’s public transit is safe.

But for the pigeons — and those who care about them — their removal is a matter of life and death.

Gallagher says the issue is not unique to Capitol Hill, though he could not say which other stations use the pigeon trap cages.

After the online posts and our questions, the traps were gone from Capitol Hill Station as of Wednesday afternoon, though Gallagher says the cages are routinely moved and emptied.

A security officer at the station said he was not sure where the cages had gone and that he had been asking his superiors who maintained them for months, but received no response. He said that he has worked at several other stations but has not seen cages anywhere else.

As for the cage’s efficacy, he was skeptical about Sound Transit’s ongoing battle.

The pigeons will come back, he said.

“They always do.”

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