A visit to City Center Bishop Ranch in San Ramon might mean dinner, shopping, a movie, or an Equinox workout–or an encounter with Pac-Man, a Harris’s hawk whose job is to help keep the upscale outdoor mall clean.
Yes, City Center has a falconer (and his menagerie of raptors) on the payroll.
More precisely, the shopping center contracts with Falcon Force, a professional bird-abatement company, to bring Pac-Man and his handler, Ricky Ortiz, to the property several times each week. Ortiz and Pac-Man have been spotted overlooking Alexander Square, helping discourage nuisance birds from settling into the center’s trees and public spaces.
Why invite a raptor to your shopping mall? Red-winged blackbirds are drawn to food scraps in the plaza, then perch in the tall trees above it — leaving a mess behind. They also harass innocent sandwich-eaters at the shopping center’s outdoor tables. Pac-Man’s presence is intended to convince the birds that the area is no longer a comfortable place to hang around.
The approach is called falconry-based bird abatement. Rather than relying only on netting, noise devices, or other deterrents, trained hawks and falcons use the simple predator-prey dynamic to make nuisance birds move along. Falcon Force says it provides these services at locations including vineyards, airports, crop fields, and landfills. City Center may be one of the more stylish assignments on the list.
Don’t worry–the raptor doesn’t actually eat the little birds. There mere presence of a bird of prey is enough to scare them off. So most of Pac-Man’s day is spent hanging around the shopping center, perching on signs and delighting visitors.
Pac-Man is technically a hawk, not a falcon, but the human profession is still called falconry. And Ortiz has become something of a local raptor celebrity before: he and Pac-Man previously worked with BART at El Cerrito del Norte Station, where they were brought in to discourage pigeons from roosting above commuters.
City Center Bishop Ranch, at 6000 Bollinger Canyon Road, is San Ramon’s 300,000-square-foot retail, dining, and entertainment hub. We’ve covered their restaurants extensively. And it’s cool to know that those restaurants (or at least your takeout Mendo sandwich) are being watched over, well, like a hawk.
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