by johnnymarin | Oct 27, 2018 | Pigeon Patrol's Services
The Yarmouk district in Damascus has switched hands many times in Syria’s war: from rebels, to Daesh (so-called IS) militants, and back to government forces. But Abu Nimr did not budge.
He has remained in his family home with his dog through bombs, siege, and fierce battles for more than seven years, raising pigeons on his roof even as people fled in droves.
Since the army clawed back the enclave around five months ago, he has helped clear heaps of rubble from the streets and repair abandoned houses.
“My siblings and I lived in this building. They’re all married. They left so their kids could go to school,” Abu Nimr told Reuters in the Yarmouk Palestinian camp in the Syrian capital.
“I thought I’d stay here alone, keep an eye on the family property, and hoped things would be resolved within days. But seven years passed, God kept me patient.”
Abu Nimr, who is originally Palestinian, owned a shop selling sweets like baklawa before the conflict.
At the onset, he stored food from the empty houses of his relatives. As supplies dwindled, he often slept hungry. “I took a decision seven years ago that weapons are not my thing. Bloodshed is not easy,” he said.
Abu Nimr, 36, did odd jobs over the years and spent time with his dog Balo. “He was my friend through the siege, and I relied on him to guard the house when I went out.”
When the fighting got too close, he would hide in the furthest room with a hammer in case he had to dig himself out.
The violence has turned his neighborhood into a ghost town, with twisted metal and collapsed walls still blocking some streets. Others are closed off with signs warning of landmines.
By the time the last battle came this year, after scores of residents had escaped or died, only 16 people were left in his neighborhood.
But he refused to leave. “The people fled? The warplanes dropped bombs? The militants entered? It doesn’t matter.”
Now, Abu Nimr wants to bring life back to Yarmouk and hopes people will be able to return soon.
Former neighbors and residents call him from other parts of Syria or abroad, asking him to check on their homes. They send him some money to clean up and repair damages.
State employees and volunteers have opened all of the main roads, he said. “We help with what we can.”
About Pigeon Patrol:
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 Gel and the best Ultrasonic and audible sound devices on the market today.
Voted Best Canadian wholesaler for Bird Deterrent products four years in a row.
Contact Info: 1- 877– 4– NO-BIRD (www.pigeonpatrol.ca)
by johnnymarin | Oct 26, 2018 | Pigeon Patrol's Services
He turns to sisters Gian and Inez and snaps at them: “The reason they’re here defecating and spreading germs all over the place is because people like you feed them!”
The man, who declined to give his name, then takes a fresh mouthful of water before launching another attack on the birds.
Inez says this outburst is relatively mild, adding that she has seen people pour boiling water over pigeons.
She and Gian run “Hong Kong Pigeon and Dove Rescue”, a Facebook group dedicated to promoting awareness for the well-being of pigeons, and which teaches members how to nurse sick birds back to health.
When Gian rescued her first pigeon four years ago, she took the injured bird to several vets before one was willing to take a look at it. The pigeon had a broken wing and it was likely it would never fly again. On the vet’s advice, Gian reluctantly had the bird put down. “Looking back, I think I could’ve nursed it back to health and kept it,” she says. “Even if it never flew again, at least it would’ve lived.”
It was this loss that inspired Gian and Inez, both in their 30s and who prefer to be mentioned only by their first names, to start the Facebook group. With the help of a few like-minded friends, in one year, the group has developed into a community of more than 1,100 members.
“There aren’t many locally available pigeon care resources and providers, unlike those for cats and dogs,” says Gian, a self-taught pigeon rescuer.
“So we created a platform where people can exchange pigeon care tips and learn how to care for sick and injured pigeons without professional intervention.”
For many Hongkongers, like those in the park, what they are doing is unthinkable.
“Pigeons are filthy!” Leung Iok-lam, 70, says.
A pair of Form Six students from a nearby secondary school seem to agree. “I wouldn’t touch a sick pigeon if I saw one,” Melody Ni Tak-yan says. “I’d worry about contracting some sort of disease.”
“Or making a sick pigeon sicker,” Lim Chi-ling adds.
Gian and Inez however, believe pigeons are the victims of misconceptions.
“Many people automatically associate pigeons with avian flu, partly because of public health campaigns,” says Gian, referring to government regulations that forbid feeding feral pigeons to prevent the spread of so-called “bird diseases”.
“I see where they’re coming from, but I hope they would delve deeper into this issue instead of simply believing everything they hear.”
The regulations were introduced in 2003 as part of the government’s efforts to slow the growth of feral bird populations, which authorities claimed were a public nuisance and the cause of hygiene problems. Offenders face fines of HK$1,500 (US$191).
However, according to findings by the World Health Organisation (WHO) from 2002, comparative studies involving pigeons and other bird species showed pigeons were resistant or minimally susceptible to coming down with bird flu.
Subsequent studies on pigeons sampled in China, Japan, Turkey, Romania and Ukraine suggest that pigeons have played a minimal role in the spread of the H5N1 avian flu virus, which emerged in 2004.
Still, the WHO cautioned against unnecessary close contact with pigeons, citing other studies that demonstrate an increased susceptibility of pigeons to the H5N1 strain.
Gian and Inez, who have cared for more than 100 sick or injured pigeons over the past four years, say they have never contracted diseases from the birds, despite not using gloves, surgical masks and other protective gear when handling them. The sisters believe the government’s persistent warnings have created an unwarranted fear of pigeons among many Hongkongers, including even animal health care workers.
“One time, I took a pigeon to the vet to get an X-ray – and it was returned to me with a broken leg,” says Inez. She suspects the medical staff, whom she says were reluctant to handle the bird , broke the leg during the scan.
Meanwhile, Gian recalls being turned down by multiple vets: “Many vets are concerned about taking in pigeons because they do not want to risk getting in trouble with the law, or worry about bird flu affecting business.”
“Many vets are concerned about taking in pigeons because they do not want to risk getting in trouble with the law, or worry about bird flu affecting business”
In Hong Kong, premises where more than 20 pigeons are bred, housed, or cared for require a licence.
Gian has had to rent a second flat to accommodate her work. Her retail career, which requires shift work, means dedicating time to the pigeons can sometimes be difficult. “When you really believe in something, you’ll do whatever it takes to do it right,” she says.
Looking ahead, the Facebook group hopes to involve more experts and professionals from relevant fields to conduct research on the impact of pigeons on public health and the environment, and potentially propose changes to legislation and education – for example, designating feeding zones and implementing measures to control the pigeon population.
Passionate as she may be, Gian is careful where she draws the line between her career, personal life and volunteering. “Many people take it for granted that we would drop everything and help out whenever there is a pigeon in need,” she says. “But I have my own life to lead. If we’re going to push for change, it’s got to be a team effort.”
About Pigeon Patrol:
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 Gel and the best Ultrasonic and audible sound devices on the market today.
Voted Best Canadian wholesaler for Bird Deterrent products four years in a row.
Contact Info: 1- 877– 4– NO-BIRD (www.pigeonpatrol.ca)
by johnnymarin | Oct 25, 2018 | Pigeon Patrol's Services
A group of thirteen pigeons currently living in a research facility in Australia are making history as the first ever pigeons to contain the Cas9 gene in their reproductive systems.
Ben Novak, a scientist committed to “de-extinction” and bringing back the passenger pigeon, has high hopes for the offspring of the pigeons.
Because the birds contain the Cas9 genes, their squabs (fledgling pigeons) will have the Cas9 gene in every single cell and researchers will be able to edit their DNA using CRISPR, a revolutionary gene-editing tool.
If successful, the pigeons will be the first live animals ever edited with extinct DNA.
The ultimate goal is to edit the DNA of the pigeons and incorporate crucial traits of the long-since exciting passenger pigeon to create wholly new hybrids that look and act like passenger pigeons.
This process is similar to plans for bringing back the woolly mammoth by using Asian elephants, the woolly mammoth’s closest living relative.
Sequencing the genome of an extinct species presents many challenges for researchers because the fossil fragments left behind and on display in museums or labs contain only a partial picture.
According to the Wall Street Journal, after an animal dies, it’s DNA begins to degrade and so extinct animals have only fragments of a complete genome.
From this, researchers need to get creative to fill in the blanks and so the obvious solution is to look to the closest living relative of the extinct species in question.
Beth Shapiro, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, led a project that compared the sequenced genome of the band-tailed pigeon and extinct passenger pigeons.
This allowed the research team to identify the genes that set the two species apart. The newly sequenced fragments of the passenger pigeon also revealed new insight into why the birds went extinct.
Once, passenger pigeons were the most abundant land bird in the United States. Passenger pigeons suffered speedy declines because their meat was prized and they were hunted to the brink of extinction. The last known passenger pigeon died in 1914.
Shapiro’s research shows that the birds were genetically geared to thrive in large flocks and it was their sharp dip in numbers that made them more vulnerable and less able to cope.
“Passenger pigeons were fantastically well adapted to living in their large population sizes,” Shapiro told the Daily Mail. “It was the very sudden shift to a small population size that was problematic.”
The researchers also found that the birds were not as genetically diverse as other abundant species.
Building on Shapiro’s research, Novak hopes to breed his new Cas9 pigeons until he has 22 living pairs of feelings that will eventually be bred as well. Once the birds are introduced to passenger pigeon DNA, Novak’s team will edit band-tailed pigeons with as many traits from the passenger pigeon as possible.
About Pigeon Patrol:
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 Gel and the best Ultrasonic and audible sound devices on the market today.
Voted Best Canadian wholesaler for Bird Deterrent products four years in a row.
Contact Info: 1- 877– 4– NO-BIRD (www.pigeonpatrol.ca)
by johnnymarin | Oct 19, 2018 | Pigeon Patrol's Services
We humans are like the pigeon, which sits on a high-tension wire, thinking it is safe. It believes it is the lucky one and no harm will come to it. In how we perceive the environment, its use, conservation and preservation, we are like that pigeon. We build houses on mountains, cutting them to build resorts and roads, and expect landslides and flash floods to never occur. We do illegal sand mining, change the course of rivers and expect them to never die, or the ecology to never wither. We build infrastructure in floodplains, and pray there are no floods. We build cement cities, and then, rue the effects of global warming. We dump plastic waste in nullahs, khads and rivers, and expect fish meat to be nutritious.
Our un-ecological actions go on and on. We shirk our responsibilities towards nature and expect it to bless us with abundant resources.
Several international conventions like Bonn, Rotterdam, CITES and CMS have been working for the conservation of environment, but it has not percolated down to the grassroots. Else why would developed countries continue with coal emissions? Why is the green action climate fund empty? Or, here in India, why swachhta has to be an abhiyan? It should be a part of life.
Perhaps the concept of a welfare state has made us totally dependent on the government for providing and provisioning everything. We do not want to stop using plastic, but we want the administration to take care of all garbage, whether flung across a valley or littered in nullahs. We do not want to pay our taxes fully (India’s tax to GDP ratio is about 4 per cent), which can be used to fund the expensive R&D to build cleaner technologies. But we want low-cost technological solutions to green problems. We strive less to keep public transport and public facilities clean, and then, make that an excuse to use private transport and seek private facilities everywhere, taking the carbon footprint a thousand notches higher!
Why, even after so much research and awareness about ecology and need to be environmentally conscious, our greed knows no bounds? Why do we exploit our resources like we are the last generation? Why do we hoard land and water to become rich while communities out there are languishing in inhuman ghettos? If epidemics originate from such ghettos, they will reach us too!
Population is out of control. The earth’s carrying capacity has remained a topic for books and examinations. Campaigns regarding this are many in the social dimension, but is the urgency of the issue understood? The pigeon in us is not only resting on dangerous ground, but also has its eyes closed, thinking the cat is away. It is time to open the eyes and see: disasters await if we do not change our way of life.
About Pigeon Patrol:
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 Gel and the best Ultrasonic and audible sound devices on the market today.
Voted Best Canadian wholesaler for Bird Deterrent products four years in a row.
Contact Info: 1- 877– 4– NO-BIRD (www.pigeonpatrol.ca)
by johnnymarin | Oct 15, 2018 | Pigeon Patrol's Services
The psychologist BF Skinner put pigeons in a box to study their responses to stimuli. One cohort were given grain if they pecked a button and they quickly worked out the mechanism by which they were being rewarded. In another group, however, grain was dispensed entirely randomly, with no input from the pigeon having any effect. Rather than clocking this distribution as entirely senseless, Skinner found these pigeons instead contrived ever more elaborate patterns of behaviour to get the desired effect. Some walked in circles, others pecked at the walls, each thinking they had intuited some replicable method of attaining their desire. I think of that second group of pigeons a lot, pacing anti-clockwise round our bedroom, humming as I rub my son’s temple in a desperate attempt to get him to sleep.
The issue of sleep is one I’ve not really broached in this column since – whisper it – my son had previously slept quite well in his early days. We have friends with toddlers who’ve never slept three hours in a single block, so we know how obnoxious that sounds. But for a brief, exalted time that now seems to wave to us from a distant past, he did exactly that. And we held this like a shameful secret, fearing the magic of this particular arrangement would be broken if we said it aloud. Or, like Superman’s parents, feared our beloved Clark would be taken away from us so that his super powers would be studied.
But that was then. Now, we spend our nights pondering over the wisdom of evolution, to have made these small, delicate objects simultaneously so reliant on sleep and so bad at realising this fact. My son resists sleep so enthusiastically, I’m starting to think that being closely cuddled and softly shushed is, for him, roughly equivalent to taking cocaine.
One thing that does help is music. Partly to make it more pleasurable for me and partly because I’m the worst, I feed my son a steady diet of recursive ambient music by people who sell tote bags at their gigs. Autechre’s Vletrmx21 is one of my favourite songs, now slowly curdling in my brain from applying it several times a day like an antiseptic scrub for his waking mind. If you were to look in on me putting him down for a nap, it would be to that track. It sounds like the dying siren of a rescue droid, drifting through the dust of a dead planet, seeking signs of life.
But the abstruse electronica I’ve been peddling turns out to be nowhere near as effective as my wife’s secret weapon. It renders my son unconscious as reliably as chloroform. It’s the strangled tones of Ewan McGregor and Nicole Kidman straining their way through the Love Medley from Moulin Rouge.
Perhaps, were he to spy our son’s fate, some poor pigeon, tracing futile circles in a distant lab, will thank his lucky stars.
About Pigeon Patrol:
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 Gel and the best Ultrasonic and audible sound devices on the market today.
Voted Best Canadian wholesaler for Bird Deterrent products four years in a row.
Contact Info: 1- 877– 4– NO-BIRD (www.pigeonpatrol.ca)
by johnnymarin | Oct 14, 2018 | Pigeon Patrol's Services
NEW ALBANY, Indiana — When Stephen Price agreed to let one of his tenants bring home a gaggle of pigeons, he didn’t know what he was getting himself into.
To be fair, the tenant, Robert “Painter Bob” Maskalick, warned him.
“He always told me, he said, ‘One day, you’re going to inherit these,'” Price said, sitting in the backyard of a house he owns on the corner of East Main and Vincennes streets in New Albany.
Maskalick built coops for the 40-or-so pigeons, kept them fed and periodically let them fly free. The birds, a mixture of roller and homing pigeons equipped with a natural GPS and survival sense, always came back.
Price thinks the birds helped Maskalick, in his early 60s, live longer than he would have otherwise. Maskalick, who had a heart condition, died about a year ago.
“I think they actually gave him several years longer, because it has a calming effect,” Price said of the pigeons. “If you ever would come out here and sit and watch, it’s like watching an aquarium or something … It calms you down, it mellows you out.”
The soft, rolling coo of the pigeons is something like a lullaby. With strangers around, they cock their heads and perch on edges. Most of Price’s pigeons are white, glistening in the low, late-afternoon sun, peeking through the wire. Others are white with black speckles, or the signature deep blues with small patches of shimmering green.
Price used popcorn — a pigeon favorite — to coax them out one day last week. Each one flapped its wings through the open gate before swiftly changing direction and landing atop the coop. They stayed there — free, but safe. Price said the birds know when darkness is near, and that the setting sun means predators are lurking. So when he releases them in the evening, they stay close, despite their ability to fly hundreds of miles away.
Still, Price has lost pigeons to hawks.
“It’s nature, but it’s very morbid,” he said.
Other than needing protection from harm, pigeons are “durable” birds, Price said. They need little more than food and clean water.
“They’re just really tough birds,” but soft as pillows, he added.
After Maskalick died, Price, who lives a few houses away and owns several nearby properties, took on the role of pigeon caretaker. He admits he’s considered getting rid of the birds, but he’s too attached to go through with it. His adoration is never more evident than when he talks to the pigeons in a steady, high-pitched tone.
“You gotta talk real nice to them,” he explained.
It’s a tactic Price has learned by doing, just like he learned almost everything else about pigeon care-taking. He’s also gotten insight from fellow pigeon people who drop tips here and there. And yes, there are plenty of fellow pigeon people. Later this month, Price and his daughter (who happens to be a longtime bird lover) will go to the National Young Bird Show in Louisville. It’s one of the country’s largest all-breed pigeon shows, according to the event’s website.
Rick Kilgore, president of the Indiana Pigeon Club and owner of more than 100 pigeons, said it’s a well-respected show competition that attracts people from all over the world.
Kilgore has raised pigeons since he was about 6 years old. He likes the challenge of improving a breed (there are hundreds of pigeon breeds) and the friendly competition of a show or race.
The Indiana Pigeon Club has 40 to 50 members and keeps growing, Kilgore said. More 4-H kids are staying interested, and it’s those kids who will keep the hobby alive.
For now, Price just enjoys the company of his pigeons.
“I tell a lot of the guys who rent from me this … in life, stay grounded and you’ll be happier,” he said. “… By living simple and doing really simple things, it’s amazing how happy you can be by doing literally almost nothing.
“You just have to kind of relax and enjoy it.”
About Pigeon Patrol:
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 Gel and the best Ultrasonic and audible sound devices on the market today.
Voted Best Canadian wholesaler for Bird Deterrent products four years in a row.
Contact Info: 1- 877– 4– NO-BIRD (www.pigeonpatrol.ca)
