Jaco was named after the electric bass player Jaco Pastorius, whom Mr. MacLeod, also a bass player, said he watched playing in Washington Square for money. Mr. MacLeod splits his time between a house on Long Island and a pied-à-terre in the West Village, where on weeknights his pigeons spend the night roosting.

“They’re waiting there on the window sill when I get home,” he said. Mr. MacLeod said he himself was adopted, and grew up largely in Stuyvesant Town, loving and loved by unlikely animals like squirrels and unfriendly dogs.

He is not one of those scruffy types who slops out the seed and gets covered with pigeon droppings — although he does hang around with some of those folks in the park. He is a sharply dressed real estate agent with Miron Properties and he lets pigeons — well, his pigeons anyway — roost, even on his designer suits, because his birds are trained not to leave droppings on him.

“You see that?” he said like a proud parent. “Jaco just flew away and pooped and now he’s back.”

Mr. MacLeod, whose office is nearby on East 10th Street, visits the park on weekdays and musters his birds like a drill sergeant.

“It’s kind of like going home in the middle of the day and playing with your cat or dog,” he said, standing with some of the other pigeon lovers in the park, including Paul Zig, 55, who is known as Pigeon. Mr. Zig, a local fixture always draped in pigeons that feed from his hands, helped convert Mr. MacLeod.