Someone is stealing pigeons off New York City’s streets.

Captured in grainy bystander video, it happened on a day in early April in Manhattan, when a man, his face obscured by a low-slung hat, swooped a giant butterfly net over a small flock, scooped up dozens of birds and popped them into the trunk of a car parked on 10th Avenue.

Reviled as rats with wings or, by a slimmer margin, beloved as downy, dirty urban icons, pigeons seem as much a part of New York as its skyline. The sympathetic throw them pretzel chunks, the disgusted kick their way through their sidewalk confabs, and even the agnostic cover their heads when passing below their subway platform roosts.

But who would steal pigeons?

Mother Pigeon, a pro-pigeon activist who feeds flocks of pigeons dressed as a pigeon while also selling felted figurines of pigeons, was sure she had the answer: the two brothers who own a pet store at the edge of Bushwick, Brooklyn. Their shop caters to the city’s dwindling corps of pigeon keepers, and she believes they are reselling the birds for use in live pigeon shoots in Pennsylvania.

And so last month, she and a small collection of pigeon activists showed up at the store, Broadway Pigeons & Pet Supplies, waving placards and chanting on the sidewalk. The owners deny having anything to do with stolen pigeons and say they have been unfairly attacked by pigeon partisans.

But not long after the protest, a new suspect emerged.

Somewhat lost in the conflict is a fact little known to most people: that New York City’s pigeons do, in fact, get snatched with some regularity. There was a rash of thefts in 2017, 2019 and again in 2022, according to Humane World for Animals, which has tracked the nettings. Some of those birds, the organization says, end up as fodder for a controversial but legal sport with committed defenders, in which the main object is to toss a live bird in the air and shoot it.