MARY POPPINS has a lot to answer for. Feed the birds? Better to wring their fat little necks and make like an Egyptian restaurateur: pluck em, stuff em, and roast em . . . then serve to tourists.

Oh it might seem all cutesy-pie to throw a few crumbs for the mangy scavengers, but city streets, buildings and shoulders would be better off without them.

Not that I don't have some sympathy for 77-year-old Anne Stevenson, of East Kilbride, who mistakenly thought feeding sky-rats was a kindness.

To be on the receiving end of South Lanarkshire Council bureaucracy, a body more noted for its inability to empty rubbish bins properly/on time/at all (delete as appropriate) than for wit, subtlety, style or humour must have been a shock - even forgetting the irony.

Despite the surprise and undoubted upset, the anonymous clype who shopped the old lady is due credit for their public spirit.

Pigeons, along with seagulls, starlings and most urban birds, are a pestilence we could well live without.

Their filth is a health hazard and low-level bombing runs a menace.

Seagulls are even more of a danger: the B-52 bomber of bird-life, mean, aggressive and raucous.

A couple of years ago office staff were attacked outside their city centre buildings - remember Hitchcock's The Birds - because they had the bad luck to work too close to nesting sites.

A few decades back Glasgow Corporation had the guts to tackle the city's starling problem in a humane, if unconven-tional, way.

They sent in some commandos: Cameron's Commandos, a wily operator who sound-blasted the birds off their stoops and cleared the streets and buildings in one fell, dare I suggest, swoop.

Building owners, as I recall, had tried draping netting to dissuade the birds from landing, but after a few score were trapped and died, squeamish bird lovers cried foul.

My preferred solution, two good eyes and a barrel-load of buckshot, is unlikely to be favoured in the city centre, yet an answer has to be found.

Aside from any health issues, bird droppings are unsightly, damage buildings and wreak havoc on car bodywork.

Take a stroll along the Broomielaw under Central Station Bridge and take a brolly too - but not for rain.

And before any RSPB-types whinge about the legal niceties and morality of destroying wildlife, let's be under no illusions.

Urban birds are not wildlife but feral creatures living off our garbage at the scum end of the food chain, not that any self respecting animal, humans not excluded, would eat them.

Anyone who throws crumbs in their direction might as well chuck out scraps for starving rats and the odd leftover for an urban fox or give a nice, warm home to a family of mice.

Pigeons and seagulls are not endangered species worthy of preservation but a nuisance, plain and simple.

It's time to send them on a one-way flight ... to extinction.