If you happen to be at SoFi Stadium on the right day of the week, you might notice some predatory birds zooming above the lake near the stadium. And although it is a spectacle, they’re not there for show. These birds, and their trainer, Jorge Herrera, have an important job to do.
Seagulls would normally be drawn to a big entertainment complex with lots of leftover food and easy access to water. But the presence of predatory birds — like the Harris’s hawks you can glimpse at SoFi Stadium and the surrounding Hollywood Park complex — helps scare the gulls away.
Herrera said keeping the birds away from the property helps address concerns of cleanliness, since birds have to urinate and defecate frequently in order to maintain a low enough weight to fly. They also bring trash to the stadium from elsewhere, like chicken bones and fast food sauce packets.
But keeping the birds away could be a matter of life and death. Since the stadium’s lake is directly under the flight path of many planes going to and from LAX, birds that get caught in engines can force planes down, like when US Airways pilot Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger had to make an emergency landing on New York’s Hudson River after geese got stuck in his plane’s engines during takeoff from LaGuardia Airport in 2009.
“It could cause a big situation,” Herrera said. “We don't want to have a cloud of gulls in the flight path.”
And while wild predatory birds are known to hang around in the vicinity, they often don’t do much to keep the gulls away. Herrera said he’s seen a peregrine falcon hanging around SoFi Stadium year-round with her mates and offspring, but they’re much less successful than his own hawks at intimidating seagulls.
“We’ve seen them — they come in and they're trying to do our job for us,” Herrera said. “And it's real fun for us to see, and the gulls don't budge off of the ledges around the lake.”
What does scare the gulls away, Herrera said, is his hawks flying in a direct line through where the gulls are congregating. He’s set up several points along the lake that the hawks are trained to fly to, though he said the birds care much more about the meat they’ll receive as a reward than the gulls they’re intimidating.
Herrera said he uses six to eight Harris’s hawks of various ages, and it typically only takes a week to train them to hit their marks. They're one of the best species to train for this purpose, as they scare seagulls away much more easily than similar birds like red-tailed hawks.
“They're not just killers,” he said. “They're smart. They each have their personality and you just work with it. Some are more shy than others. Some are more social. Some are more mellow. I have a variety of different personalities, and I work with what they give me.”
And at this point, the Harris’s hawks aren’t the only birds that have been trained to behave in a certain way — the gulls are also primed to leave as soon as they see Herrera approaching with a hawk in tow.
“I pull up, I stop the cart, get out, and they start booking it,” Herrera said. “They start leaving the ledges, they start clearing out before I can even get the bird up in the air.”
But if you’re looking to catch a glimpse of the hawks doing their job at the next Chargers game, you’ll be out of luck, since Herrera and his hawks prefer to avoid the limelight.
“We stay low key,” Herrera said. “We don't want to attract too much attention because, unfortunately, we're not really there for show and tell. We have a job to do because birds can get out of control.”
