The 10 Wildest 311 Complaints New Yorkers Have Actually Filed

Someone in Washington Heights called 311 in September 2025 to report a monkey at 560 West 184th Street. The next day, someone called about a monkey at 563 West 184th Street — the building next door. Health inspectors showed up both times. Both times, nobody answered the door.

Across the city, the Department of Health has been dispatched to investigate twenty-two separate monkey reports tied to private residential addresses. Manhattan leads. The Bronx is a close second. The inspectors almost never find the monkey.

A common pattern in the file: the same Bronx address at 1115 East 165th Street has been called in twice — June and August 2025 — for a snake being kept inside the unit. New York City bans most snake species as pets. The complaints come from every borough.

Hens are legal in New York City. Roosters are not. The reason is the 5 a.m. crowing. Six hundred and four times, a neighbor has decided enough was enough and dialed 311 on a rooster.

Ferrets are banned in New York City — a Giuliani-era rule that has somehow survived three mayors. Iguanas are fine to own but illegal to release, and the city ends up with a small but steady stream of "iguana in the building" calls anyway. The turtle has its own federal law: any pet turtle with a shell under four inches is illegal nationwide, because tiny turtles spread salmonella to tiny humans who put them in their mouths.

The descriptor field on these is doing a lot of work. The city had to add a separate category — "Beekeeping - Honeybees" (102 calls) — for the legitimate rooftop apiarists. Everyone else gets the "not a beekeeper" tag, which is just the city's polite way of saying there is a hive on this property and the person responsible for it has some explaining to do.

Of those, 277 are filed specifically under "Pigeon Odor." There is an inspector, somewhere in this city, whose job includes determining whether a smell is or is not a pigeon.

This is the closest the 311 system comes to lore. The "sweet odor" category exists because, for years, New Yorkers kept reporting a maple-syrup smell drifting over Manhattan with no obvious source. The city eventually traced it to a New Jersey fragrance plant processing fenugreek seeds. The category never went away. People still call.

Not a typo. New Yorkers have filed nearly ninety-four thousand 311 complaints about helicopter noise. About 1,000 of those are specifically tagged "NYPD." Another 940 are tagged "News Gathering." The remaining ninety-thousand-something are just helicopter, please make it stop. The category has its own dashboard at City Hall. The helicopters keep flying.

Manhattan has no wild deer. Brooklyn has no wild deer. There are deer on Staten Island, and a handful in the far reaches of the Bronx and Queens, and apparently — thirteen times — one of them has died somewhere a New Yorker noticed. The Sanitation Department has a code for it. They had to.

The summer of 2020 generated tens of thousands of these in a few weeks, when the entire city seemed to be testing mortar shells off rooftops every night. But the calls never stopped. The city gets illegal-fireworks complaints in February. In a Tuesday rainstorm. At 4 a.m. in November. Someone, somewhere in New York, is always lighting something they shouldn't be.