NEW YORK -- In Central Park near the entrance to the zoo every day for 10 years the gray-haired pigeon lady has tended her strutting, bobbing, flapping, cooing, red-eyed brood.
Pigeons on her shoulders, pigeons in her lap, pigeons on her blue hat.
'Pigeon lady,' say the people as they pass. 'Oh, look, a pigeon lady.'
A young girl pauses to stare.
'Here pet, here pet,' the pigeon lady calls to her birds.
The girl moves slightly; the flock bursts into the air.
'See, you frightened them,' says the old lady.
A slate-gray sky, a pre-winter wind -- the leaves scatter.
Miss Elsie Wright puts her seed into a shopping bag on the bench. She is short and thin and neat in her blue dress and red-green-beige cloth coat, with a crinkled, smile-creased face and red hands cracked white with cold.
'Aren't they lovely?' she asks in her thick burr (Scotland to Montreal to Detroit to New York). 'Oh, I just love them.
'That's why I feed them. For 10 years! That's a lot of peanuts and seed. That's why I ask them for a quarter for seed before they take my picture. I think it's right, don't you? I mean it's not right to take someone's picture in the park without asking them, is it?
'But it's cold and I have to eat my lunch,' she says.
'Goodbye.'
She walks off briskly, stopping to say a few words to a man feeding the birds. She pats his shoulder, then walks up the footpath and out of the park.
Ten years.
'Oh, at least,' said Evans Angel in a nearby booth, selling tickets for his Central Park Pony Cart ride. 'Every day, all year. She leaves about 2:30, 3 o'clock. Gets here about 11:30, 12.
'Years ago we used to have the squirrel man. He had a nighttime job in the theater district and used to come here in the daytime and feed the squirrels. He was here about 10, 11 years and then he died. Then he had a friend who did the same. Max was his name. He died, too. 'Miss Wright loves birds for some reason. She loves these pigeons and she loves those birds that whistle to her, over here,' said Angel, pointing into the zoo at the tropical bird cage.
'I think she has a title or something from Europe,' said Theone Angel, who sat crocheting in the brick booth behind her husband. 'She has a pin. She wears it on her coat all the time. I asked her what it was. She said it was a title. That's what she told me.'
'She knows the birds,' said Mr. Angel. 'Oh, yeah, you see them birds every day and you can tell the difference. There's one pigeon with one leg and she looks for it all day. It's all white. She calls for it: 'Whitey, Whitey.''
'One has feathers on its legs,' said Mrs. Angel.
'There was one bird named Rocky,' said Mr. Angel.
Turning to his wife, he said: 'You remember Rocky.' She nodded, looking down at her needlework. Mr. Angel turned back, pointed to the counter and said, 'He used to come right up here and I used to feed him.'
