Are Birds Actually Government-Issued Drones? So Says a New Conspiracy Theory Making Waves

by Pigeon Patrol | Dec 7, 2021 | 4-S Gel Bird repellent, Animal Deterrent Products, Bird Deterrent Products, Bird Law, Bird Netting, Bird Spikes

The CIA assassinated John F. Kennedy after he refused to kill and replace billions of birds with drones. The U.S. government is sequestering a team of Boeing engineers in Area 51 for a secret military mission. Our tax dollars have been funneled into building the “Turkey X500,” a robot used to hunt large birds.

Combine all these conspiracies and you get Birds Aren’t Real, a nearly two-year-old movement that claims the CIA took out 12 billion feathered fugitives because directors within the organization were “annoyed that birds had been dropping fecal matter on their car windows.” The targets were eradicated between 1959 and 1971 with specially altered B-52 bombers stocked with poison. They were then supplanted with avian-like robots that could be used to surveil Americans.

Sounds extreme but also somewhat fitting, given the landscape of today’s social discourse. By surfacing murky bits of history and the ubiquity of Aves, Birds Aren’t Real feeds into this era of post-truth politics. The campaign relies on internet-fueled guerilla marketing to spread its message, manifesting through real-world posters and Photoshopped propaganda tagged with the “Birds Aren’t Real” slogan.

For much of its devoted fanbase, Birds Aren’t Real is a respite from America’s political divide—a joke so preposterous both conservatives and liberals can laugh at it. But for a few followers, this movement is no more unbelievable than QAnon, a right-wing conspiracy theory turned marketing ploy that holds that someone with high-level government clearance is planting coded tips in the news. Therein lies the genius of Birds Aren’t Real: It’s a digital breadcrumb trail that leads to a website that leads to a shop full of ready-to-buy merchandise.

The creative muscle behind the avian-inspired conspiracy (and thinly disguised marketing scheme) is 20-year-old Peter McIndoe, an English and philosophy major at the University of Memphis in Tennessee. McIndoe first went live with Birds Aren’t Real in January 2017 at his city’s Women’s March. A video from the event shows McIndoe with a crudely drawn sign, heckling protesters with lines like, “Birds are a myth; they’re an illusion; they’re a lie. Wake up America! Wake up!” The idea of selling Birds Aren’t Real goods, he says, came after the stunt gained traction over Instagram.

McIndoe didn’t break character once during a 30-minute-long phone interview with Audubon. He defended the movement’s legitimacy, mainly by proselytizing about what Birds Aren’t Real isn’t. “The thought that this could be used to make a satire of a dark and tense time in American culture—I find those things to be baloney,” McIndoe says.

What isn’t baloney is the attention Birds Aren’t Real has drawn on social media, thanks to an Instagram account with more than 50,000 followers, a YouTube page with more than 45,000 views, and a Twitter profile with nearly 8,500 followers. McIndoe handles all these accounts and fulfills every order for the Birds Aren’t Real goods he sells online. He declined to comment on how much money he’s made off the T-shirts, hats, and stickers, many of which are out of stock.

Exploiting conspiracists for profit is nothing new, says Mike Metzler, a social media influencer and viral-content creator on Instagram. Amazon sells dozens of styles of QAnon T-shirts that have become a fixture at Make America Great Again rallies around the country. What’s different is that while many QAnon believers wear their shirts in earnest, most Birds Aren’t Real fans seem to wear theirs to be ironic and on trend.

“Birds Aren’t Real is taking advantage of the meme-ification of previous conspiracy theories,” Metzler says. “People really want to believe in conspiracies—but more than that, people want to make fun of people who believe in conspiracies even more. Starting a conspiracy theory and selling Birds Aren’t Real merchandise allows them to sell to both sides,” Metzler says.

McIndoe’s movement got a free jolt of publicity on October 30 after Chicago-based journalist Robert Loerzel tweeted a photo of a Birds Aren’t Real flier he found on the street. The same flier also popped up on Reddit numerous times over the past month. The hectic and cryptic nature of the website makes it an incubator for conspiracy theories like QAnon. The Reddit forum r/conspiracy has 721,000 anonymous subscribers alone.

While some people will draw parallels between QAnon and Birds Aren’t Real (they were both launched in 2017, after all), their popularity on Reddit is the only true similarity, says Brooke Binkowski, managing editor of the myth-busting website TruthOrFiction.com and the former managing editor of Snopes. “Birds Aren’t Real is a good one, but it in no way ranks up there with the incredible complexity of whatever QAnon is,” she says over email. “QAnon has caught on because it’s interactive, it’s always evolving, and it’s completely vague—so vague that anything they say could be ‘true’ if you interpret it the right way.”

How could Birds Aren’t Real gain more dark-web cred then? “Conspiracy theories offer a way for the world to make sense, and they offer a sense of purpose to the purposeless,” Binkowski writes. “If Birds Aren’t Real hinted at some larger, dark pattern, it would really take flight.”

For now, though, this shallow conspiracy seems harmless and may even be a net gain for birds. Jordan Rutter, the director of public relations at the American Bird Conservancy, thinks the intricate history behind McIndoe’s movement is hilarious and thus, something positive. “Anything that gets people talking about birds is a good thing,” she says. “It’s definitely a way we can start a conversation.”

The filmmaker Oliver Stone once wrote that Kennedy’s assassination is “a mystery wrapped in a riddle inside an enigma.” Birds Aren’t Real, on the other hand, is a chimera of conspiracies that wraps satire, modern insecurities, and internet culture into a successful marketing scheme.

Source

Pigeon Patrol Products & Services is the leading manufacturer and distributor of bird deterrent (control) products in Canada. Pigeon Patrol products have solved pest bird problems in industrial, commercial, and residential settings since 2000, by using safe and humane bird deterrents with only bird and animal friendly solutions. At Pigeon Patrol, we manufacture and offer a variety of bird deterrents, ranging from Ultra-flex Bird Spikes with UV protection, Bird Netting, 4-S Bird Gel and the best Ultrasonic and audible sound devices on the market today.

Voted Best Canadian wholesaler for Bird Deterrent products ten years in a row.

Contact us at 1- 877– 4– NO-BIRD, (604) 585-9279 or visit our website at www.pigeonpatrol.ca

Pigeon/Pigeon Patrol / Pigeons Roosting / Vancouver Pigeon Control /Bird Spikes / Bird Control / Bird Deterrent / Pigeon Deterrent?  Surrey Pigeon Control / Pest /Seagull deterrent / Vancouver Pigeon Blog / Birds Inside Home / Pigeons in the cities / Ice Pigeons/ What to do about pigeons/ sparrows , Damage by Sparrows, How To Keep Raccoons Away,  Why Are Raccoons Considered Pests/ De-fence / Pigeon Nesting/ Bird Droppings / Pigeon Dropping/ woodpecker control/ Professional Bird Control Company/ Keep The Birds Away/ Birds/rats/ seagull/pigeon/woodpecker/ dove/sparrow/pidgeon control/pidgeon problem/ pidgeon control/flying rats/ pigeon Problems/ bird netting/bird gel/bird spray/bird nails/ bird guard

Tastes Like Chicken

by Pigeon Patrol | Nov 30, 2021 | 4-S Gel Bird repellent, Animal Deterrent Products, Bird Deterrent Products, Bird Law, Bird Netting, Bird Spikes

The bird was still steaming as I cut into its succulent red breast. It had spent the day marinating in honey, thyme and vinegar, and now came the roasty aroma and the moment I’d been waiting for: the first moist, silky bite. Surprisingly gamey, the flavor reminded me more of an elk steak than any poultry I’d ever eaten. So this is what pigeon tastes like!

Yes, I served pigeon for dinner, though eaters call it by another name—squab. Long before they were regarded as an urban plague, the hearty little birds served as a staple food and even delectable delicacy, from ancient Egypt to medieval Europe and into modern North America. Only in the past century or so have the birds fallen from culinary grace.

Today, pigeons have found themselves, well, pigeonholed into two groups: the ubiquitous and reviled rat with wings, and a succulent entrée on haute menus. While no New York eater would dream of cooking up the feral fowl, the domestic variety’s pedigree justifies indulging in Thomas Farm’s squab with foie gras–madeira emulsion on Per Se’s $295 winter tasting menu before catching the latest opera. But while they may not flock together, these are indeed birds of a feather.

As lamb is to mutton, veal is to beef, and Cornish hen is to chicken, squab is just another name for a young pigeon, harvested when it is plump enough to satiate an empty stomach but tender enough to please the palate. So how did this divide come about? Is there any difference between the sidewalk scourge and their country cousins cooing on upscale organic farms? Does that which we call a squab by any other name still taste as sweet?

Ancient Egyptians kept domesticated pigeons, which doubled as messengers and main courses. Pigeons carrying postal messages regularly announced arriving visitors, according to records from 2900 BCE, and ancient art depicts Queen Nefertiti handing a pigeon to her young daughter while servants roast the birds.

Starting in the Middle Ages, French lords and ladies considered pigeons a delicacy. The bird’s dung made excellent fertilizer, and its rich red breast earned it the nickname “the bird of royalty.” For several centuries, nobles built elaborate dovecotes to attract feral pigeons (doves are the romantic members of the family Columbidae, which they share with pigeons), though their serfs hated them. The lowly peasants had to feed the voracious birds from their own grain yields and clean up their abundant dung. When the Revolution struck in the 1789, many of the dovecotes—which had become a symbol of aristocracy—were destroyed.

Rock pigeons—the species with whom New Yorkers share our streets—made their landing in the United States precisely because of their tastiness. French settlers introduced the birds in the 1600s, helping to expand their natural range of Europe, North Africa and South Asia into the New World. Early Americans also feasted on the local varieties, like the passenger pigeon, which they quickly began munching into extinction. Though numbering in the billions when Europeans first arrived, passenger pigeons were exploited as cheap food in the 19th century; Martha, the world’s last passenger pigeon, died in 1914 at the Cincinnati Zoo.

While Americans had long caught wild squab or tended small farms flocks, the first U.S. commercial breeding facility for squab popped up in 1874, with production ramping up in the years following. By 1907, hundreds of breeding facilities dotted the country, primarily to sell to restaurants. Some chicken farms were even converted to squab operations, while facilities in Bridgeton, New Jersey, alone raised thousands of birds dubbed “Jersey Squab.” The Great Depression brought the price of squab plummeting to that of chicken, pork or beef, which, according to Wendell Levi, author of the 1941 book The Pigeon, “allowed the housewife to include squabs in her family menus.”

But as factory farming spread its wings, a competitor displaced squab from the American menu: chicken. Agricultural economists found that while you can fatten a pigeon, you can fatten a chicken faster, explains Colin Jerolmack, a professor of sociology and environmental studies at NYU who recently authored a book called The Global Pigeon, due to arrive on shelves February 2013. By World War II, the sun had set on squab’s long heyday.

Meanwhile, as squab retreated from the family dinner table, Americans were coming to know the bird not for its plump place on the plate but for its unwanted urban ubiquity.

Jerolmack’s paper “How Pigeons Became Rats” describes an early instance of public pigeon-hating. Up until the 1960s, some parks even had designated pigeon feeding areas, but around that time a NYC park commissioner referenced the “filth and disorder” of Bryant Park brought upon by “winos,” “homosexuals” and pigeons. Public health officials (inaccurately) referenced the birds in connection with diseases, which helped solidify their low status. By 1980, when Woody Allen declared pigeons “rats with wings,” the birds were widely reviled.

“When you go to a restaurant and ask the waiter what squab is, they’re hesitant to answer,” Jerolmack says. “A lot of people think it’s a wild game animal,” he says. But today, the squab served at upscale restaurants and specialty butchers is usually raised on poultry farms.

Ariane Daguin, the famous French tastemaker behind gourmet ingredient supplier D’Artagnan, has helped Americans forget prejudices against fowl and other fauna. (Her father, Michelin-starred chef André Daguin, remains a star for championing magret, the large breast of the Moulard— the duck breed prized for foie gras—served rare.) In New York Daguin is very well known for foie gras, and, to a lesser extent, rabbit—both meats that are beloved in France but have something of a PR problem in America. Pigeon fits that portfolio perfectly, and under her wing, the bird has found favor here, albeit not under that name. Today D’Artagnan provides most fine Manhattan restaurants with their squab, dispatching 1,800 to 2,500 birds per week.

D’Artagnan offers several breeds of squab, but the King breed is their star. “I really fell in love with that when I arrived here because we don’t have that breed in France, and it’s exceptionally plump,” says Daguin. “I think I’ve been raving so much about it that some people in France have now brought it there.”

D’Artagnan sources squab from a cooperative of free-range farms in California. They’re harvested at about 28 days old, when the squabs reach adult size but before their young muscles toughen. “We have a very funny way to test whether the squab are the right age when they arrive at our loading dock,” Daguin says. “We open the cages, and if they fly out, that means they’re too old.”

In addition to their farm-raised squab, D’Artagnan also sells wild birds called wood pigeons. The animals come from Scotland (game hunted on U.S. soil cannot be legally sold) and are a bit smaller and leaner than the domestic squab, tasting of “true wild game,” Daguin says.

In France, dining on little pigeons is still a big thing. And here in the States, she reports a growing demand among chefs but also on the part of home cooks, who order the birds through her Web site. “People are starting to understand how delicate and rich squab is, and how easy it is to cook,” she says.

As for the city flocks, Daguin says, “unless you are dying and it’s a survival thing, I would never eat them.” But it’s not disease that makes pigeon a poor fit for dinner. Pigeon plagues are more or less a myth; they carry no more infectious pests than any other bird, including chickens and turkeys. Far more treacherous is the sidewalk birds’ diet. “As soon as wild animals are too close to man, they eat things that man rejects,” Daguin says. Jerolmack points out that feral pigeons could be eating rat poison, metals or battery acid—all things that cooking would not neutralize.

Nonetheless—and you might not want to read this while eating—a recent spate of pigeon nabbing has sparked rumors that some street birds indeed end up under knife and fork. A few enterprising individuals scatter birdseed to attract a feathery flash mob, then snatch the birds up in nets and stuff them into the back of vans. Most seem to wind up on live shooting facilities in Pennsylvania. But during his research, Jerolmack met some of these shady snatchers. “I’ve heard—but cannot confirm—that some street pigeons get sold to live poultry markets,” he says.

At such facilities in East Williamsburg and Bushwick, mostly serving a Hispanic clientele, live pigeons can indeed be found alongside ducks and chickens but the animals’ origins remain unconfirmed. “People know they’re not supposed to be selling street pigeons,” Jerolmack says. “If a poultry market is selling them, they’re selling them to customers who assume they’ve been bred.”

And though some media outlets reported a gang of vagabonds roasting pigeon over an open fire last summer in Prospect Park, officials told Edible that those claims were untrue.

Given the city birds’ trash-can diet, even hardcore locavores will want to leave them be. Instead, for eaters interested in tasting one of mankind’s longtime favorite flavors, L. Simchick butcher in the Upper East Side carries Daguin’s farm-raised birds for $22 a pound, or you can head down to Chinatown where frozen birds go for $7.89, or fresh ones for $14. While you’re in the neighborhood, swing by Columbus Park to see if you can spot one of those infamous pigeon-snatchers, or just to feed the birds.

Source

Pigeon Patrol Products & Services is the leading manufacturer and distributor of bird deterrent (control) products in Canada. Pigeon Patrol products have solved pest bird problems in industrial, commercial, and residential settings since 2000, by using safe and humane bird deterrents with only bird and animal friendly solutions. At Pigeon Patrol, we manufacture and offer a variety of bird deterrents, ranging from Ultra-flex Bird Spikes with UV protection, Bird Netting, 4-S Bird Gel and the best Ultrasonic and audible sound devices on the market today.

Voted Best Canadian wholesaler for Bird Deterrent products ten years in a row.

Contact us at 1- 877– 4– NO-BIRD, (604) 585-9279 or visit our website at www.pigeonpatrol.ca

Pigeon/Pigeon Patrol / Pigeons Roosting / Vancouver Pigeon Control /Bird Spikes / Bird Control / Bird Deterrent / Pigeon Deterrent?  Surrey Pigeon Control / Pest /Seagull deterrent / Vancouver Pigeon Blog / Birds Inside Home / Pigeons in the cities / Ice Pigeons/ What to do about pigeons/ sparrows , Damage by Sparrows, How To Keep Raccoons Away,  Why Are Raccoons Considered Pests/ De-fence / Pigeon Nesting/ Bird Droppings / Pigeon Dropping/ woodpecker control/ Professional Bird Control Company/ Keep The Birds Away/ Birds/rats/ seagull/pigeon/woodpecker/ dove/sparrow/pidgeon control/pidgeon problem/ pidgeon control/flying rats/ pigeon Problems/ bird netting/bird gel/bird spray/bird nails/ bird guard

A Bone To Pick: Why Do Pigeons Eat Fried Chicken on the Street?

by Pigeon Patrol | Nov 12, 2021 | 4-S Gel Bird repellent, Animal Deterrent Products, Bird Deterrent Products, Bird Law, Bird Netting, Bird Spikes

Poor urban pigeons, they’re raised in the slipstream between double decker buses tumbling along ancient, polluted roads, feeding on grains, bread and whatever else is flung their way. They’re too inedible to fall under the remit of the Game Farmers Association (GFA), and they’re too abundant in cities to be important to the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) meaning they receive no ecological protection. Besides, most of us see them as a blight of flying rats. So they are left to fend for themselves, living in a kind of Dickensian dystopia, thriving on the rubbish the rest of us throw away.

This hunt for survival has taken an unseemly turn. If you live in a city, you will probably have seen it a hundred times, maybe without even thinking about it: pigeons eating chicken bones. They feast on discarded boxes of chicken and chips like they were a Serengeti watering hole, prodding, pecking and poking at the innards of its carcass. They gorge on its flesh near-cannibalistically, before flinging its bones like majorettes twirling batons.

I know we all hate pigeons, but that can’t be good for them, can it? Aren’t they supposed to be herbivores? A spokesperson for the GFA, which focuses on breeding wood pigeons to make them hunt-ready tells VICE: “I certainly haven’t heard of pigeons eating chicken bones. Pigeons, like doves and all of those sorts of birds, are not meat eaters. But urban pigeons are very different to the ones we get in the countryside.”

The feral pigeon, these mongrel bastard birds, have fallen through the cracks. So I turned to the British Trust for Ornithology’s spokesperson and ornithologist himself, Paul Sandcliffe, in the hopes he might know a bit more about why a herbivore bird would want to feast on chicken bones.

VICE: Hi Paul. Why do you think pigeons might eat bits of chicken bones? Are they just feral compared to their rural cousins?
Paul: When we get back to basics, urban pigeons are not that different to rural pigeons, they will feed in large flocks, and once one pigeon is on the ground, it will attract other pigeons. The major difference between these birds, though, is their diet. Rural pigeons are looking for large seeds or cereal grains like rapeseed which are high in energy and can actually fill them. Whereas urban pigeons are just looking for any food that’s available and will test out anything.

So when they’re pecking the chicken they’re just trying it out?
Yes. Pigeons aren’t carnivorous but they’ve come across this potential food, they’ve checked it out, and if it’s edible, they’ll eat it.

Is it possible that the way fried or marinaded chicken is cooked; in flour and batter and sauces makes it less like chicken and more appealing to the pigeon?
I think the big thing making this chicken appealing to the pigeon is that it’s cooked. Lots of birds aren’t specifically carnivorous but if they come across a dead bird they’ll have a peck at it and take some of the meat. I’ve seen it in footage of coal tits in Northern Scotland, pecking at a deer carcass. They can do it because, ostensibly they’re insectivorous [vegetarian except for insects], so they do have this element of a carnivorous diet. But pigeons are granivorous [grain-eating] so their beak is designed for grains. If they come across a corpse they just can’t deal with it; the skin’s too tough to peck through. But if the corpse has been cooked then the texture is soft. So they can peck at it and bits come away. They’re probably not even thinking of it as meat if they’re thinking at all. It’s just food.

Let’s say a pigeon managed to eat a chicken nugget’s worth of chicken, though. Is that any good for its digestion?
I’m not particularly sure there would be a negative impact. Really? But it sounds so gross.
Birds, by their very physiology, won’t eat more than they should eat. Pigeons can’t afford to be fat because it affects their weight and then they can’t fly. And when they can’t fly it makes them vulnerable to predation

Do pigeons actually go through that thought process? Or do they simply stop when they’re full?
It’s just nature for them to stop when they’re full. You could give a blackbird a bucket of worms and it will only eat the amount it needs to survive in that moment and still make a quick escape if needs be. Same goes for a pigeon.

That’s smart. A farmer once told me that chickens will eat concrete to get the right nutrients to make its eggs. Is there any chance pigeons are eating chicken bones to get the right nutrients to make their own eggs?
Female pigeons will be looking for a source of calcium and calcium is hard to come by. They do eat grit and small stones so they probably get a little bit of calcium that way. It’s not impossible that they could eat bones too. I have a wildebeest skull on the shed at the bottom of my garden and over time, the bone has started to break down and become porous and soft inside. Now the blue tits are coming and taking bits of that skull as a source of calcium. I’ve never seen pigeons on that skull, but it’s probably because they’re not agile enough to get up to it. They have to find sources of calcium somewhere, so it could be that the small pieces of bone on the chicken provide that.

So they’re not gross for eating chicken, just resourceful?
All a bird does all day every day is search for food because they can’t have a big breakfast and be done with it. They have to eat small amounts throughout the day. So they’re spending all day every day looking for food and that includes checking out bits of chicken.