A bird rescue organization in Las Vegas is looking for answers after videos went viral over the past week showing pigeons walking around in the city wearing cowboy hats.
In a video that has racked up more than 2 million views on Twitter since Saturday, a pair of pigeons can be seen wearing cowboy hats while walking in what appears to be a parking lot in Las Vegas.
“Someone is putting tiny cowboy hats on Vegas pigeons. There are consequences to legalizing marijuana,” the video caption read.
Someone is putting tiny cowboy hats on Vegas pigeons. There are consequences to legalizing marijuana. pic.twitter.com/CdK06gauYQ
— Las Vegas Locally (@LasVegasLocally) December 7, 2019
A longer clip of the moment shot by a man identified by The New York Times as Bobby Lee has been viewed more than 108,000 times on Facebook.
“F—in’ birds have hats on bro,” Lee said in the video. “What the f—?”
Lee told the Times that he captured the moment while en route to a local grocery store and shared it on social media shortly after. It took off from there.
“It got a lot of attention fast,” Lee told the paper. “The day after I had a lot of news people texting me and people trying to buy my video.”
Lofty Hopes, a Las Vegas-based bird rescue group, has also been in touch with Lee in an effort to find the birds.
Mariah Hillman, co-founder of Lofty Hopes, told Vice and The Times that her organization has received more reports of cowboy hat-donning pigeons.
“We just know of the two pigeons that were seen in the video, two out of four,” Hillman said to Vice on Tuesday. “But looking at that video, it has to be glue [keeping the hats on the birds’ heads]. I don’t see any string, so it has to be glue. That’s just dumb.”
“If the hats are still on, it’s probably superglue,” she said. “It’s kind of crazy.”
She said someone “would’ve had to have trapped the pigeons to have done it.”
“Pigeons mate for life, so if one was removed, this could be breaking up families or leaving babies to starve,” she continued. “Also, there’s no way of knowing whether they were released back in the same area where they were caught.”
Hillman told Vice she hopes the birds turn up again soon so they can take off the hats.
“We can use oil to un-attach glue, like when a rat gets caught in a sticky trap,” Hillman said. “But then they have grease on them. It will probably take a while to get [the glue] off, whether they molt or we remove it.”
