Each day at Capitol Hill Station, light rail riders pass a red and white mural of a playfully downturned hand, titled Walking Fingers," on their way down to the underground trains or up onto Broadway.
The scene below isn't so whimsical, because riders have to sidestep glops of bird droppings that coat the tiles, walls and escalator frames.
Sound Transit has struggled for years to keep this and a few other white-streaked train stops clean, and recently stepped up its efforts. International soccer fans will converge on Seattle in mid-2026 for six FIFA World Cup matches.
"For sure this is part of our cleanup for the World Cup, but I also want to make sure we have clean stations for our riders that are not just visiting," said transit board member Kristina Walker, a Tacoma council member who chairs the ridership committee.
The regional agency will spend more money on contractors and deep-clean station entrances, install additional deterrents such as spikes or nets, and possibly consider birth control pills.
Though pigeons hardly measure up to some other regional transit challenges — making trains run on time, preventing crashes with cars and pedestrians, or a $35 billion increase to build the three-county train network through the 2040s — their scat makes commuting drearier and can corrode steel equipment.
Architects and contractors traditionally haven’t thought about pigeons, but “bird deterrence” appears in government design manuals now. No matter where crews add spikes, pigeons discover new niches to roost.
"The pigeons — I don't want to say evolved, but they adapted," said David Nixon, a lead maintenance custodian overseeing the effort at Capitol Hill. Soon after the station opened in 2016, workers hung the first nets above the Broadway entrances, blocking birds' flight onto certain beams. The birds flew deeper inside, where work crews couldn't easily reach, some 30 feet up and directly over stairs.
"I grew up in New York City, so I know a lot about pigeons," said Nixon, as a gray-magenta bird orbited above the escalators. "They’re smarter than people would normally think."
Other than a lofty ledge, the main perk pigeon colonies seek is food. Capitol Hill Station’s southwest entrance, adjacent to Seattle Central College, provides plenty.
Dick's Drive-In customers fumble fries or buns, there’s a grocery market nearby, and the South Asian restaurant next door, though equipped with spikes, also has tattered awnings where pigeons congregate. From there, it's a simple glide into station rafters.
Transit riders Britnee and Rob Anderson take an ambivalent view. "I'm a pigeon lover. They're just serene. They're peaceful to me and they bring happiness," Britnee said. Cleaning workers can't be everywhere, so on bad days, goo gets on their shoes, they said.
Jamie Lutton, owner of Twice Sold Tales bookstore a block away, rode an elevator to escape the filthy escalators. She blames human folly, and what she called futile measures such as the spikes, which some birds do find an adequate perch. "They're here because people drop food," she said.
A transit worker wet-mops the floor nightly, and sometimes during the day. For a while in 2023, Sound Transit trapped pigeons in cages and released them off-site, Capitol Hill Seattle Blog reported.
This year, workers erected a temporary scaffold so they could fasten spikes on the last few unprotected beams, formerly considered un-perchable because they’re angled. Pigeons used the scaffold as a rest area. A tagger climbed it and scribbled on the red mural. Weeks before, contractors set more spike strips over the north entrance at Broadway and East John Street, but the 1 Line’s train-departure video screen lacks them, and remain clouded by streaks.
"It's very unsightly,” Nixon said, “and the public is thanking us for trying to attempt to do something about it.”
International District/Chinatown Station, with its large plaza, attracts a coterie of 100 to 150 birds that sit on the deteriorating, 36-year-old rain canopies. On a recent day, they swooped down to the sidewalk to nibble spilled cannellini beans, then grasped the ledge of an empty building, before completing their 50-foot-diameter circuit to the transit stop. Thousands of spikes and so-called daddy longlegs wires (shaped like an upside-down spider) cover each lamp and camera, but birds easily grasp the slanted canopy roofs.
Tukwila International Boulevard Station, despite 16 years of cat-and-mouse to birdproof its spectacular roof angles, still has a couple zones where you might get bombarded.
Amanda Rivas, a morning commuter, took cover under the concrete grand staircase, while she waited for a bus. The plaza rarely gets pressure-washed, she said, but pigeons would return the next day so why waste money? "They're trying to keep it clean for people, so it's not as disgusting. I'm good to just 'let it go.' They're birds."
Even at the new Federal Way Downtown Station, which doesn't open until Dec. 6, there was one mini-mound in the pedestrian plaza, marked by an orange warning cone, early this month.
Birds and bids
The struggle to repel birds is a multimillion-dollar industry.
Sound Transit signed a $889,954 contract for three years of "downtown transit tunnel bird mitigation services" at four stations through June 2026. A bevy of smaller agreements exist for other light rail and Sounder commuter train depots.
Costs are hard to track, because “bird mitigation” is sometimes bundled with rat control by Sound Transit, and with bridge maintenance by the Washington State Department of Transportation.
WSDOT has paid $18,000 to spike an old Everett bridge, and $37,000 to bird-proof its new Mukilteo ferry terminal, as line items in bigger contracts. The state has sometimes glued doughnut-shaped gel packets onto girders, because pigeons hate the squishy feeling of landing on them, said spokesperson Barbara LaBoe.
About 100 times a year statewide, workers blast bird droppings to smithereens with hoses, called "bridge flushing," which typically requires blocking some drains so the dirty runoff flows toward land instead of waterways.
Left uncleaned, droppings turn to salt and ammonia that corrodes steel. Dung accelerated rust on the I-35W bridge in Minneapolis long before its 2007 collapse killed 13 people, though the National Transportation Safety Board didn’t finger it as a cause.
Tacoma’s city-owned Fishing Wars Memorial Bridge accumulated so many droppings that workers could no longer discern whether the century-old span was structurally sound, and it closed in 2023. A project to clean the steel beams (while wrapping the bridge to avoid polluting the Puyallup River) and consider restoring traffic is scheduled next year.
Washington state requires bridge inspectors to "avoid the disturbance of guano, for safety's sake. It must be carefully managed. Bird droppings are especially hazardous when they dry into dust, warns Washington State University. Among other diseases, psittacosis can produce fever, sore throat, light sensitivity, severe loss of appetite and headaches. People handling dung should use nonlatex rubber gloves, soak droppings with a 10% bleach spray, and seal contaminated material in bags, WSU says.
The Northwest's most infamous bird skirmish is underway now at the Oregon-owned Astoria Megler Bridge above the Columbia River. Some 10,000 salmon-gobbling cormorants moved there when the federal government eradicated birds and eggs from an island. Dung 2 to 3 inches thick caused $1 million in damage — among the many reasons Oregon embarked on an $18 million deterrence plan. Catwalks will help workers harass the cormorants, and a firefighting boat will haze them with water jets.
Pigeons on the pill
The pigeon, also called a feral rock dove, congregates around Vancouver, B.C.’s SkyTrain; staff says wildlife caused 544 train stalls in 2021 by triggering trackway intrusion alarms. Bird populations have since been “stabilized” using ultrasound, spikes, nets and birth control pellets served in feeders.
About those birth control pellets: Erick Wolf, CEO of OVO Control brand, says for a one-year supply of avian contraceptive and feeder to sterilize 150 birds, “You’re looking at $10,000. It’s chump change in the world of pigeon control.”
Even if surrounded by other urban habitats, a single feeding station can lower flock size by 50% a year, he said, because they’re homebodies that forage within a tiny range.
Sound Transit tried OVO Control at International District/Chinatown for nine months in 2024-25. “There were significant challenges to train the birds to feed regularly,” because people regularly tossed food, said spokesperson Rachelle Cunningham. Birth control might be useful at other stations, she said.
Early next year, Sound Transit expects to install bird-deterrent features at Northgate Station and hire experts to study Capitol Hill, Mount Baker, Beacon Hill, Tukwila International Boulevard, and SeaTac/Airport stations. Transit staff are planning another $344,000 project at King Street Station, where birds gather at staircase windows north of Jackson Street.
Sound Transit is scheduling International District/Chinatown Station for a power wash, right before the big soccer tournament in June.
Back at Capitol Hill Station, the southwest lobby was looking spiffier by mid-November, with a thinner gunk trail on the floor, after transit contractors spiked some of the most secluded beams. Chalky goo still coated part of the escalator frames, where wall tiles allow claw space overhead.
A young woman waiting for the bus on Broadway regarded some rock doves pecking near a street tree, reached into her jacket, and tossed them an ounce of grain.
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