Broadband is the most modern of communication means, while carrier pigeons date back to Roman times.
But on Thursday, a race between the two highlighted the low speeds of rural broadband in the UK; the pigeon won.
Ten USB key-laden pigeons were released from a Yorkshire farm at the same time a five-minute video upload was begun.
An hour and a quarter later, the pigeons had reached their destination in Skegness 120km away, while only 24% of a 300MB file had uploaded.
Campaigners say the stunt was being carried out to illustrate that broadband in some parts of the UK is still “not fit for purpose”.
It is not the first time that such a race has taken place. Last year a similar experiment in Durban, South Africa saw Winston the pigeon take two hours to finish a 96km journey. In the same time just 4% of a 4GB file had downloaded.
The pigeons are expected to complete a 120km journey to Skegness in around two hours, but Tref Davies, who is organising the stunt to give publicity to the campaign for better rural broadband, said the broadband connection will take significantly longer to transfer the 300MB file.
“The farm we are using has a connection of around 100 to 200 Kbps (kilobits per second),” Tref Davies, the stunt’s organiser, told BBC News on Thursday morning.
“The kids need to do school work and the farmer has to submit online forms but the connection is not fit for purpose.”
Mr Davies, who is co-founder of business ISP Timico and serves on the board of ISPA (Internet Service Providers’ Association), believes the issue is one that industry and government needs to address.
“This is the UK. It should be well-connected but around a third of homes still can’t get broadband,” he said.
However, BT disputes his figures. A spokesperson said that 99% of homes could now get broadband, leaving an estimated 160,000 lines “where excessive line length means broadband won’t work”.
Speed test
Even among those who can get broadband, rural areas are fighting to get reasonable speeds.
Research commissioned by the BBC last year found that around three million homes in the UK had internet connections of below 2Mbps (megabits per second).
The government has committed to delivering a minimum of 2Mbps to every home by 2015.
However, a recent report by communications watchdog Ofcom found that while these “headline speeds” were on the rise, they are not the relevant measure for broadband customers.
According to the report, “although headline speeds increased by nearly 50% between April 2009 and May 2010, actual speeds delivered increased by just 27%, and averaged just 46% of headline speeds”.
Lloyd Felton, founder of the Rural Broadband Partnership, said the effort to draw attention to rural broadband deprivation and low speeds was laudable.
“It’s true that there are particular areas of the country that suffer much more than others,” Mr Felton told BBC News.
“You’ve got massive deprivation – this long-quoted ‘digital divide’. As we all get more dependent on the internet, that divide gets wider.
“In the end it’s who takes ownership and responsibility for co-ordinating how a parish is going to handle it – what we say is that ‘communities need to help themselves to broadband’.”
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
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A little experiment: What comes to mind when you hear the word “dove”?
Intimations of peace? The promise of hope after long hardship, à la Noah releasing a snow-white bird to gauge the waters of the flood? A kick-ass ice cream bar? Whatever the image, the association is likely positive. Beatific, even.
Now try another word. “Pigeon.”
If you’re like most people — and especially if you’re like most city dwellers — you probably get a bit skeeved out just hearing the word. Pigeons? They might not be vermin — not exactly — but they aren’t too far up the ladder, either. They eat trash. They crap everywhere. Stupid. Filthy. Rats with wings. Right? Sorry, but not quite. In fact, not even close. And thanks to Andrew Blechman’s consistently engaging and surprising new book, “Pigeons,” the seemingly dull, unlovely members of the Columbidae family — or, rather, their idiosyncratic and intensely loyal human proponents — now have a handy arsenal of lively anecdotes and plain old facts (heads up, wisenheimers: Pigeons are doves) with which to defend their long-maligned feathered friends.
Along the way, Blechman takes pains to chronicle the views of people for whom pigeons are, at best, a nuisance and, at worst, a plague. He spends a cold, taxing day in rural Pennsylvania among a community of men, women and children who enthusiastically and unapologetically shoot pigeons for sport, for food and even for charity. He chats with the owner of a South Carolina squab-processing plant for whom the birds are nothing more than meat divinely destined for ovens, frying pans and human gullets. (“All he cares about,” Blechman writes, “are breasts, because that’s where the meat is. ‘I want nice, well-rounded ones,’ he tells me. ‘I want big breasts.'”) And, evidently without having to search too far, Blechman finds and dutifully quotes those who, for reasons as numerous as bread crumbs in St. Mark’s Square, simply despise the red-legged head-bobbers that have learned to live (and, more universally than their human counterparts, thrive) amid the chaos of modern metropolises.
But despite his fair and balanced reporting on the many detractors of, as his book’s subtitle has it, “The World’s Most Revered and Reviled Bird,” make no mistake — Blechman himself is a Columbidae family man. While he was, by his own admission, neither anti- nor pro-pigeon when he began the peripatetic journey traced in the book, something clearly happened during his wanderings through the variegated, far-flung worlds of pigeonistas. Yes, the author dutifully records the myriad arguments for the bird’s obliteration. Sure, he eats fried pigeon, and enjoys it. Admittedly, he readies, aims and fires a shotgun at pigeons, and experiences the thrill of the hunt — or, more exactly, the thrill of standing still and blasting away at birds released from spring-loaded traps. But almost before the reader has settled in and begun to enjoy Blechman’s disarming, conversational style (“Some people like pigeons. But pigeons also piss a lot of people off”), the author’s enthusiasm for his subject starts flying right off the page. One almost pictures him beating imaginary wings as he expounds on the pigeon’s mind-boggling physical attributes and capabilities:
“With hollow bones containing reservoirs of oxygen, a tapered fuselage, giant breast muscles that account for one-third of its body mass, and an ability to function indefinitely without sleep, the rock dove [as many ornithologists have begun referring to the bird] is a feathered rocket built for speed and endurance. If an average up-and-down of the wing takes the bird three feet, then a racer is making roughly 900,000 of those motions during a long-distance race, while maintaining 600 heartbeats per minute — triple its resting rate. The rock dove can reach peak velocity in seconds and maintain it for hours on end. One pigeon was recorded flying for several hours at 110 mph — an Olympian feat by any measure.”
That Blechman repeats, with only slight variations, this litany of athletic gifts throughout the book is one of the few aspects of the tale that grows old. We get it! Pigeons are incredibly fast fliers that can remain on the wing at top speed for hours on end on the avian equivalent of fumes. Is there really anything more of interest to say about the animal? What else has it got? And does the creature actually warrant writing, and reading, a whole book?
Pigeons, it turns out, have lived closely with humans, in a perpetually evolving relationship — first as a handy and docile source of protein, then as an incomparably fast means of transferring information and, finally, as a focus of sport (racing and shooting) and a pastime (show breeding) — for perhaps 10,000 years. They’ve served as symbols of fertility, peace and renewal in religions from Christianity and Judaism to Greek, Babylonian and other Mediterranean and Middle Eastern cults and creeds, while practitioners of yoga have long invoked the bird’s winged shape while assuming poses like the One-Legged King Pigeon.
For millennia, rock doves helped lost seafarers point their crafts toward land when lost, for even though the bird “often dwells on coastal cliffs, it has an aversion to large bodies of water and always flies inland in search of food. A bird released from a ship will quickly orient itself to land, and early sailors undoubtedly followed suit.”
Of course, the bird’s astonishing homing skills have been used for as long as, if not longer than, recorded history to carry messages of victory (and defeat) in war, announcements of the ascension of new kings and pharaohs to the throne, and even warnings of floods along the Nile. Underground coops discovered in Israel, dating from the time of King Solomon, held an estimated 120,000 pigeons — at least a few of which were, presumably, used for purposes other than keeping David and Bathsheba’s son and his friends readily supplied with squab.
And then there’s the tale of the creation of one of the world’s largest news companies. It all started when a failed German businessman named Israel Beer Josaphat hit upon the idea of tying tiny little bags stuffed with news and stock market prices beneath the wings of homing pigeons flown between Brussels and Aachen, Germany. The train between the cities took eight hours, the birds less than two. Josaphat ultimately changed his name to Julius Reuter and created a news-gathering empire founded on (or beneath) the wings of rock doves.
But as edifying as these historical tidbits might be, and as much about the rock dove as the book might appear to be, the story of “Pigeons” is, ultimately, one of how people respond to the bird. In the best sense, Blechman’s book reads like a series of entertaining, eye-opening magazine pieces held together by the sinews, feathers and strong, hollow bones of the rock dove. Like so many of the surprisingly enthralling books written in recent years about one discrete, at-first-glance vapid topic — Mark Kurlansky’s “Cod,” Charles Seife’s “Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea,” and innumerable others — “Pigeons” manages to illuminate not merely the ostensible subject of the book, but also something of the endearing, repellent, heroic and dastardly nature of that most bizarre of breeds, Homo sapiens.
Blechman has a shrewd eye and an ear nicely attuned to the peculiarities that reveal personality, and the human characters populating the pages of “Pigeons” are wonderfully and sympathetically drawn. From the friendly, unassuming pigeon breeders at the Grand Nationals competition held at a Lancaster, Pa., hotel, to the clearly obsessed trainers and owners of racing pigeons in the Bronx and rural England and beyond, to the happy, driven rescuer and champion of rock doves who lives in a squalid home in Arizona literally dripping with not-quite-calcified pigeon shit, the pro-bird folks who pop up in “Pigeons” make avid cat and dog people seem, well, tame in comparison.
“Sweetie, a pigeon the size of a small turkey, is pacing back and forth on what used to be a Formica kitchen counter,” Blechman writes of a bird who makes her home with Dave Roth, the one-man rescue mission and Jerry Garcia look-alike of Phoenix, Ariz. “Roth nuzzles her. ‘That’s my girl. You’re such a sweetie, aren’t you?’ He turns to face me. ‘If everybody could experience this kind of a relationship with a bird, then we wouldn’t have all the problems we have today with the pigeon haters. Pigeons can be funny, animated, and loyal like a dog. You’d be amazed.'”
This kitchen counter encounter, which appears at just about the exact halfway point of the book, is emblematic of much that’s weird and humorous and even a little unsettling about Blechman’s tale. If you’re somehow still on the fence about pigeons until this point, you’ll probably fall hard and fast on either side once you’ve spent a little time with Dave Roth. (Of eating squab, Roth opines that it’s “like Jeffrey Dahmer eating your kid.” Roth, it’s worth noting, is a bachelor. And childless.)
Finally, as fate would have it, at pretty much the exact same time that Blechman’s book was hitting bookstores, several research studies found that (wait for it) pigeons are vastly more intelligent than anyone, even most pigeon fans, have given them credit for.
“Pigeons are no slouches,” said Robert G. Cook of Tufts University, coauthor of a study that found that pigeons can remember more than 1,000 individual images. Another study showed that pigeons evidently possess the ability to compare relationships — such as sameness or difference — rather than merely identifying distinct images or objects. Researchers claimed that the ability, previously observed and quantified only in humans and a handful of other higher mammals, is a form of analogous thinking — primitive, but nonetheless exceedingly rare in the animal kingdom.
Rats with wings? Affectionate companions? Idiotic pests? Miraculous navigators? Tasty eats? Blechman’s “Pigeons” flies in the face of conventional wisdom about a symbolically freighted bird that, if we thought about it at all, we thought we knew. Time to think again.
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
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Pigeons are not pets! Feral pigeon nuisance is becoming a major problem in North America. They are not afraid of people and roost in almost any area where there is a food source. Where they eat, they leave droppings and the feral pigeons in the city and rural areas are associated with a variety of allergens, bacteria, and other health hazards.
Feeding Pigeons Destroys the Ecosystem
Many people enjoy feeding and watching feral birds, but they are unaware that they may be causing more harm than good. Feeding pigeons creates unnaturally large pigeon populations, and overcrowding can cause disease outbreaks in humans and other wild birds. Keeping a food source around your home for feral pigeons should be discouraged. Pigeons are scavengers and providing them with scraps can result in a nutritional deficiency, and they lose their natural ability to travel elsewhere to find food.
Nothing but Pigeon Poop
A typical pigeon dispenses about 25 pounds of fecal matter per year. Pigeon-related damage costs cities and homeowners for pest control and sanitation, but an even more dire reminder why you shouldn’t feed them are the diseases that can be spread from the droppings. Even with the spikes, nets, and barriers, pigeon-proofing has become a major undertaking. Feral pigeons lay eggs six times a year, and breed more rapidly when near a major food source. In some cities, feeding pigeons is illegal. If you have ever had to clean up after pigeons, you would realize if you don’t feed them they will leave and find their own food source!
Breaking the Habit
Pigeon-lovers are being blamed for the continuous list of complaints about pigeon infestation in major cities across Canada. Even tourists love feeding the pigeons, but they are ruining the building facades and monuments and continue to escalate sanitation costs. Power washing the aluminum or brick on your home is also costly. Pigeons are intelligent and will remember if they are fed. They will return and roost and find a place to nest. Eventually, you will be left with the droppings, and if an infestation occurs, it could get costly.
Dealing with an Overpopulation
If you inadvertently have fed the pigeons and you notice that you have a problem, call a pest control agent to assess the severity of the flock. Before they become a health hazard, or breed, or attract more feral pigeons, DO NOT FEED THEM! If you have bird feeders in your yard, be careful not to drop seed on the ground as this will also attract feral pigeons.
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
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New research has shown that feral, untrained pigeons can recognise individual people and are not fooled by a change of clothes.
Researchers, who presented their work at the Society for Experimental Biology Annual Conference in Glasgow on the 3rd of July, have shown that urban pigeons that have never been caught or handled can recognise individuals, probably by using facial characteristics.
Although pigeons have shown remarkable feats of perception when given training in the lab this is the first research showing similar abilities in untrained feral pigeons.
In a park in Paris city centre, pigeons were fed by two researchers, of similar build and skin colour, wearing different coloured lab coats. One individual simply ignored the pigeons, allowing them to feed while the other was hostile, and chased them away. This was followed by a second session when neither chased away the pigeons.
The experiment, which was repeated several times, showed that pigeons were able to recognise the individuals and continued to avoid the researcher who had chased them away even when they no longer did so. Swapping lab coats during the experiments did not confuse the pigeons and they continued shun the researcher who had been initially hostile.
“It is very likely that the pigeons recognised the researchers by their faces, since the individuals were both female and of a similar age, build and skin colour,” says Dr. Dalila Bovet a co-author of this work from the University of Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense. “Interestingly, the pigeons, without training, spontaneously used the most relevant characteristics of the individuals (probably facial traits), instead of the lab coats that covered 90% of the body.”
The fact that the pigeons appeared to know that clothing colour was not a good way of telling humans apart suggests that the birds have developed abilities to discriminate between humans in particular. This specialised ability may have come about over the long period of association with humans, from early domestication to many years of living in cities.
Future work will focus on identifying whether pigeons learn that humans often change clothes and so use more stable characteristics for recognition, or if there is a genetic basis for this ability, linked to domestication or to having evolved in an urban environment.
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
Most evidence suggests that the head bobbing serves a visual function.
Chickens bob their heads while walking. So do cranes, magpies and quails. In fact, head bobbing is a unique feature in birds and occurs in at least 8 of the 27 families of birds.
There are a few theories why some birds bob their heads when they walk:
Assists with balance
Provides depth perception
Sharpens their vision
However, most studies suggest that birds in motion bob their heads to stabilize their visual surroundings. In comparison, we rely more on our eye movements, not our head movements, to catch and hold images while in motion.
Picture a pigeon on a moving treadmill. What do you think would happen as the pigeon walks with the speed of the treadmill and its environment remains relatively the same? Dr. Barrie J Frost (1978) did this experiment and the pigeon’s head did not bob.
Dr. Mark Friedman (1975) also conducted a series of experiments to test the head bobbing actions of birds, using doves. His research demonstrated that the head movement is controlled more by visual stimulation than movement of the body.
Scientists continue to research head bobbing in birds. For example, scientists are currently investigating question such as “Why do some birds exhibit head bobbing, while other do not?” For more information on this topic see the related Web sites section.
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
They peck at the pavement; they coo overhead; they swoop in hundreds across town squares: Pigeons have become such a permanent fixture in our urban landscapes that cities would seem oddly vacant without them.
But while many people harbor resentment for these ubiquitous creatures — labeling them “rats with wings” — few of us stop to ponder how pigeons became so numerous in the first place, and what our own role in their urban colonization might be.
Today, in fact, there are more than 400 million pigeons worldwide, most of which live in cities. But that wasn’t always the case. The city pigeons we know today are actually descended from a wild creature known as the rock dove (Columba livia): As its name suggests, this bird prefers a rocky coastal cliff habitat to the conveniences of city life. [Why Are Chickens So Bad at Flying?]
But going as far back as 10,000 years ago, written and fossil records show that people living in ancient Mesopotamia (modern-day Iraq) and Egypt began coaxing these doves with food into human-inhabited areas, encouraging them to roost and breed on their land. “Back then, we brought rock doves into cities to eat as livestock,” Steve Portugal, a comparative ecophysiologist who studies bird flight and behavior, told Live Science. The plump, young birds especially — known as “squabs” — became a prized source of protein and fat. People then began domesticating and breeding the birds for food, creating subspecies that led to the diversity of urban pigeons known today.
Along the way, humans began to realize that pigeons were useful for much more than their meat. As the birds grew more popular in the Middle East, North Africa and Western Europe in the ensuing centuries, people began to tap into their innate talent for navigation — the same skill that makes homing pigeons famous today. Ancient records show that Mediterranean sailors used the birds to point floundering ships toward land. In cities, they became increasingly valuable as airborne messengers that could deliver important information across large distances.
From there, humanity’s appreciation for the animals only grew: Although pigeons were initially domesticated as a food source, “as other poultry became more popular, pigeons fell out of favor for eating and people began breeding them as a hobby,” said Elizabeth Carlen, a doctoral student at Fordham University in New York City who studies the evolution of urban pigeons.
By the 1600s, rock doves — non-native to the United States — had reached North America, transported by ships in the thousands. Rather than being a food source, it’s most likely that the birds were brought across from Europe to satiate the growing pigeon-breeding trend among hobbyists, said Michael Habib, a paleontologist in the Dinosaur Institute at the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History, and the University of Southern California.
Inevitably, birds escaped captivity, and began to breed freely in American cities. “We created this novel [urban] habitat and then we basically engineered an animal that does very well in that novel habitat,” Habib told Live Science. “They were successful in cities because we engineered them to be comfortable living around humans.” [Do Birds Really Abandon Their Chicks If Humans Touch Them?]
Cities became the perfect backdrop for the pioneering pigeons’ success. “Pigeons are naturally cliff-dwellers and tall buildings do a pretty great job at mimicking cliffs,” Carlen told Live Science. “Ornate facing, window sills and air-conditioning units provide fantastic perches for pigeons, similar to the crevices found on the side of a cliff.”
Another trait that makes pigeons more adaptable is their appetite. While other bird species have to rely on supplies of berries, seeds and insects, pigeons can eat just about anything that humans toss in the trash. “Other species are specialists and pigeons are the ultimate generalists,” Portugal said. “And the food is endless: I don’t think too many pigeons go to bed hungry!”
The pigeon’s unusual breeding biology seals the deal: Both parents rear their chicks on a diet of special protein- and fat-rich milk produced in a throat pouch called the crop. So, instead of having to rely on insects, worms and seeds to keep their young alive — resources that would be scarcer in cities — pigeons can provide for their offspring no matter what, Portugal says: “As long as the adults can eat, they can feed their babies, too.”
All these traits give pigeons a competitive edge compared with other species that might attempt survival in cities. Combined with the pigeon’s prolific breeding habits (parents can produce up to 10 chicks a year), it’s easy to see why these birds have become so populous around the world.
Not everyone appreciates the urban phenomenon that these birds have become — hence the “rat with wings” moniker. That’s understandable to some extent: Pigeons can spread diseases, and the mounds of guano they splatter across buildings can be cumbersome and costly to clean.
Despite this, Portugal sees a benefit to their presence in our urban environments. “They’re actually one of the few bits of wildlife that people get to interact with in cities now,” he said. What’s more, “they’re super-adaptable and super-successful; they’re the ultimate survivors. Actually, we can learn a lot from them.”
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