Hi!

Tuesday’s Now I Know, linked below, is a story about a creative effort to help control the mosquito population. Mosquitoes spread a ton of scary, dangerous diseases, and do so with deadly efficiency, and they’re really hard to kill at scale, so we’ve tried all sorts of ideas, including using drones, dragonflies, and recently, laser defense systems. And yet, the mosquitoes keep winning.

I was going to talk a lot about that today, but the truth is that I don’t know much about it beyond what is captured above. So instead, I’m going to share another story — one where I’m at its center. Or, at least, my pants were.

If you’re a long-time Now I Know reader, you know I’m a die-hard New York Mets fan (and this year has put that to the test, the last three days notwithstanding!). I go to a few games a year, and typically, it’s a good time, even when the Mets lose — I just love being at the ballpark.

May 25, 2015 was really no different. Some family members were in from out of town so, as we often do, we made a point to go to the Mets game. I was sitting in the right field bleachers (section 102 if you’re familiar with Citi Field) but there was an issue when I got to my seat: it was covered in dried pigeon poop. The usher came by and gave the seat a performative wipe with a towel, but as the word “performative” suggests, it didn’t do much, if anything. Not one to let a bit of old pigeon scat interrupt my baseball fandom, I sat down anyway. (Dutifully, I gave my family the seats untouched by pigeon particulate.)

This proved to be a mistake. Not because what was already on the seat, but because what was above. Before the third inning, a pigeon decided to add to the collection left by itself or others, and dropped a bomb on my chair. Sadly, I was still sitting in that chair, and my shorts were worse for the wear. I went to the restroom, cleaned myself off, and spent the rest of the game standing. The Mets won, 6-3, so in some sense, the myth that bird poop is good luck held true.

Later that evening, I wrote to the Mets head of marketing and communications. A couple years earlier, he had interviewed me for a job with the team, and I chose not to continue with the process afterward, which probably tells you how I felt about the interview. But in any event, he knew who I was, so I figured why not send a note? The email was pretty snarky — I ended it with “I’m a decades-long Mets fan so I’m used to getting [pooped] on by this team, but never quite as literally as today” — so I didn’t expect a reply.

He replied, and asked me to give him a call. (The email is below, which I’m really sharing because of the all-caps subject line.)

I didn’t think the issue required a phone call with a senior executive — I mean, what could he tell me that I didn’t already know? He wasn’t so happy with me when I declined to continue the interview process, and my note about the pigeons bordered on impolite — was he going to read me the riot act? Nevertheless, I gave him my number and we spoke the next day.

The call took about an hour, if memory serves, and he did almost all the talking. I didn’t ask, but, in painstaking detail, he shared all the efforts that the Mets had undertaken to get rid of the pigeons. I had suggested pigeon spikes in my email; he said they tried those, but the pigeons found places to stand where spikes couldn’t go. He told me that they brought in air raid sirens to scare them away, but pigeons are city birds and are undeterred by loud noises. He explained how they sprayed some sort of repellant gel that makes the pigeons feet heat up, but the ASPCA or PETA objected, claiming that it wasn’t humane. But, he said, they have it under control, usually — because they hired a falconer.

A falconer is a person versed in the art of falconry — the practice of using birds (falcons, often, hence the term) to hunt game birds. Basically, the falconer trains falcons to attack other birds and bring them back so the human can eat the target for dinner. That’s not very common in the 21st century, but it still exists here and there. And at some point before 2015, someone figured out that falcons can be trained to scare pigeons away.

So the Mets, he explained, hired a falconer to do exactly that. And it works — to a point. Pigeons have short memories and they don’t communicate complex information to other pigeons, so if a falcon scares away a handful of pigeons on a Saturday, there’s a very good chance that those pigeons or other pigeons will be back come Monday. Falconers are expensive, he continued, so the Mets don’t bring the birds to the ballpark every day, and it’s particularly difficult to do so when the Mets have a day game because that doesn’t leave a lot of time for the falconer to safely deploy his attack bird before fans arrive. That Monday was one such day game, and the Mets had just finished a road trip, so there was no falconry happening before that game.

The Mets guy didn’t know me that well and didn’t understand how insatiably curious I was. His decision to share the details of the Mets pigeon removal efforts was his alone — I didn’t ask, nor would I have ever thought to. And in the moment, I was bewildered — why would he think that explanation was a good use of his time? Did he really think I was going to be more likely to go back to a game now that I knew that the Mets had invested a surprisingly large amount of time, effort, and money to get the pigeons to go away — but had failed? Heck, I’m still bewildered.

But I’m glad he did. First, he also offered to comp me and my family tickets to a game, which was worth the hour-long call unto itself. (They also gave us some swag, which was doubly nice, and the tickets were pretty good!) Second, I got to learn that you could hire a falcon if you want, and that’s kind of neat. I’m probably never going to — but you never know when you’ll need to scare a menacing bird away.

The Now I Know Week In Review

Monday: They Bearly Tried to Fake It: Insurance fraud, Winnie the Pooh-style?

Tuesday: The Bug Factory That’s Saving Lives: Making mosquitos at scale.

Wednesday: Peppa Pig, Banned Down Under?: This one is about spiders, not pigs.

Thursday: The Day America Locked Canada Out of Its Garages: This would have driven me crazy, pun not intended.

Long Reads and Other Things

Here are a few things you may want to check out over the weekend:

1) “The 82-Year-Old Jump Rope Queen of Beverly Hills” (New York Times/gift link, 8 minutes, April 2026). We need more influencers like this.

2) “Why Living in a Poor Neighborhood Can Change Your Biology” (Nautilus, 10 minutes, December 2015). I wonder if the data here is more than anecdotal — the article implies that it is, but literally states “researchers began encountering anecdotal evidence that surprised them.”

3) “Lord of the Rinks. Meet the hockey CEO cashing in on your kid’s team” (USA Today, 24 minutes, May 2026). I never thought I’d read an article about a hockey rink cartel, but, stranger things have happened.

Have a great weekend!

Dan