by johnnymarin | Dec 20, 2017 | Animal Deterrent Products
Residents of Sydney’s most notorious public housing complex are being told not to feed the local rats, as the city is plagued by a worsening rodent problem.
A day after pictures emerged of a rat the size of a small cat found dead in a family’s backyard, Daily Mail Australia can reveal residents in inner-city Surry Hills have been feeding the creatures.
‘Please do not feed rats or pigeons or leave food or rubbish out of bins,’ a sign in a Family and Community Services (FACS) office window opposite Northcott towers in Belvoir Street states.
This sign appears in the window of a Family and Community Services office in Surry Hills
Pictures of a monster rat show a man with a plastic bag holding the huge rodent by the tail
Northcott towers, opposite the Family and Community Services office in Sydney’s Surry Hills
The sign telling residents not to feed rats is stuck up with other community service messages
‘Housing NSW asks that residents dispose of rubbish thoughtfully and not feed the pigeons or rats.’
The sign appears in a window with posters advertising interpreter services, the Salvation Army, the Surry Hills Drug Action Team and Northcott Community Sharps Bin.
Kandas Jordain, who lives nearby, said the extraordinary warning was needed.
‘There’s an elderly woman who sits out and feeds the ibises and the pigeons and the rats,’ Mr Jordain said.
‘I’ve told her off a few times. Every time I see her with a plastic bag I confront her.’
Mr Jordain said the ongoing light rail construction in Devonshire Street, coupled with rubbish left to rot outside buildings, contributed to the rising number of rats around his home.
Bags of rubbish are strewn in a Surry Hills street near the continuing light rail construction
Rats, including rattus norvegicus are a constant problem in large cities including Sydney
The Family and Community Services office where the ‘do not feed the rats’ sign is posted
‘I’ve got them running under my unit,’ he said. ‘When the sun goes down we’ll start hearing the rats running around.
‘You can hear them of a night time scurrying in and out.’
The FACS office caters for residents including those who live across the road in the 14-storey Northcott towers, which have a reputation for drug abuse, high unemployment and violent crime.
Earlier this week a family from Alexandria displayed a giant rat they found dead in their backyard.
The family was so afraid after the discovery they would not let their young daughter play in the backyard.
A resident feeds pigeons in Ward Park, near the Northcott towers, in Sydney’s Surry Hills
Residents in Surry Hills have been told to stop feeding local rats and pigeons (stock image)
A gigantic rat has been found dead in a Sydney family’s Alexandria backyard (stock image)
The rodent is about the size of a small cat.
The grim find follows months of concern over rat problems across Sydney.
Independent City of Sydney councillor Angela Vithoulkas has called for action on the issue.
She said the rat problem had possibly improved in the city since March but was ‘still very active in other areas’.
‘It’s the price you pay for progress and development when you choose to not address other factors that come up and allow them to get this bad,’ Cr Vithoulkas said.
Cr Vithoulkas said she was not surprised by the size of the rodent in the Alexandria backyard, stating Sydney rats were ‘well fed’.
She said the ‘public health issue’ called for the city to set up a ‘rat taskforce.’
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 | Dec 8, 2017 | Animal Deterrent Products
ECHUCA’S pigeon plague is no flight of fancy according to those on the frontline fighting increasing numbers of birds and worsening volumes of pigeon droppings.
It might not be in the asbestos category but there is no doubt a health risk exists because of the makeup of the bird’s droppings.
Echuca-Moama Uniting Church is now praying for intervention – divine would be fine but in the temporal space church spokesman John Ferris would be really happy if Campaspe Shire got in the game.
His church has spent close to $30,000 for temporary relief from the problem but several other large buildings in that part of town – from Campaspe College of Adult Education and the Backpackers to the Paramount Cinema to the old fire station – are facing the same problems.
“It has been suggested we could fix this problem by installing things such as spikes and ultrasonic bird repellers,” Mr Ferris said.
“We have such a repeller, it is 20 times the size suggested by Barry McDougal in a letter to the editor in the Riv,” he said.
“It’s on the church roof and it does work in the area that the speaker’s sound reaches – so the pigeons have shuffled along and now perch just outside the range of the sound.”
Mr Ferris said there is a nesting pair of peregrine falcons in the church tower and they are enthusiastically doing their bit, but at a pigeon a day they are being outbred.
“It is our hope the shire council can provide support and leadership in assisting the occupiers of affected properties (of which there are many) in an eradication process,” he said.
“We can disturb the birds nesting and roosting positions on our roof, but we are unable to rid ourselves of them totally without such council support.
“We have a request in with the shire asking for their leadership and support on this. Our thinking is an eradication program led by them on behalf of property owners; who should be asked to bear associated costs.
“But we haven’t heard anything yet.”
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 | Nov 29, 2017 | Animal Deterrent Products
A mystery Brummie spent £60 sending an injured PIGEON from Aston to a wildlife sanctuary in Nuneaton – by taxi.
Shocked sanctuary owner Geoff Grewcock said the centre received a call to say that an injured animal would be arriving in a cab from the city – a distance of 25 miles.
The kind hearted woman had even sent a donation to the Nuneaton and Warwickshire Wildlife Sanctuary – as well as paying £60 for the pigeon’s journey.
Stunned Geoff said “it goes to show what loving, caring people there are out there”.
“It was incredible,” added Geoff, who has run the sanctuary for 16 years.
“The woman had sent the pigeon in the back of a taxi, on its own, from Aston to us here, and even sent a donation for us as well, I could not believe it.”
He explained that the animal lover had found the injured pigeon and taken it along to the PDSA in Aston.
“They said that they would have to put it down but she said ‘No, you are not’,” he explained.
“That’s when she phoned us here. She told us that she would be sending it in a taxi, and she did. It was marvellous, it just goes to show the lengths that some people will go to care for animals, it is incredibly kind.”
He has admitted that he has seen some sights during his time at the animal haven, but none like the arrival of the injured bird at the weekend.
“It was strange knowing a taxi was coming with a pigeon in the back but it goes to show what loving, caring people there are out there,” Geoff added.
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 | Nov 18, 2017 | Animal Deterrent Products
We found these pigeons in a little park next to St. Paul’s Hotel in Kensington. They are the fattest damn pigeons I’ve ever seen. They look like they could explode any moment.
Unsurprisingly, they’re also lazy. They didn’t scatter when we approached. Nor did they flock over to us hoping for a bit of bread or something. As near as I could tell, their philosophy was simple: they wouldn’t bother moving unless you actually held out some food and they could confirm that it was worth the trouble to waddle over.
None of the other pigeons in the area look like this. Just these. The hotel folks must throw out absolute bucketloads of food to them.
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 | Nov 15, 2017 | Animal Deterrent Products
Visitors to Preston bus station have been warned not to be alarmed if the council’s new pest control officers come swooping down from above. In a bid to tackle persistent problems with pesky pigeons, county hall has turned to a trio of Harris Hawks to keep them in check. The birds of prey; named Oslo, Henry and Holly, will be on shift rotation at the station tasked with scaring off the mass of feathered foes. The move has been prompted by years of the pests making their way into buildings and causing a mess with their droppings. And they made a swoop for new territory when glass panels were replaced along one side of the Grade II listed building earlier this year, part of the multi-million pound redevelopment project. Andrew Barrow, the county council’s project manager for the redevelopment, said: “The hawk has been flying in the concourse to scare off the pigeons. We’ve already carried out one successful session and we’ve got other sessions planned. “We know that it’s an unusual sight if you’re not expecting it. “You might see the hawk flying around, under the watch of its falconer, but it shouldn’t cause any problems for people using the bus station. “The pigeons are a nuisance and we need to get them out of the bus station. “This is a widely-used method of dealing with this sort of issue and is used at other large buildings, airports and famously even at Wimbledon.” The hawks, who will be accompanied by experts from SMJ Falconry, will visit at different times of day so the pigeons do not become accustomed to a regular timetable. The £23m revamp of the station includes a new paved courtyard and public space along with the addition of a city Youth Zone at the north end.
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 | Nov 8, 2017 | Animal Deterrent Products
Claude Craig jokes that the antiquated communications system used by first responders in Whitfield County had nearly reached the point where it might soon have been better to just toss pigeons into the air with notes on their legs telling lawmen where they were needed.
There’s no need for such drastic measures now, though, as Mr. Craig, director of the county’s Emergency Management Agency, reports that a new $12 million state-of-the-art communications system, paid for with SPLOST funds, has been up and running since early August.
“We Band-Aided and repaired and fixed for 43 years on that system,” said Mr. Craig, who ironically had just started at the sheriff’s office when the old radios were installed, “and it finally got to the point where there were no more Band-Aids. It was just unacceptable and didn’t work. You could be standing in a parking lot somewhere, and I could holler at you and hear you fine, but I couldn’t talk to you on the radio.”
Mr. Craig thanked local voters for approving a SPLOST in March 2015 to pay for the new system. Two and a half years of planning finally came to a close on Aug. 2-3 when workers in several city and county departments switched over to the new digital communications system.
“What a glorious day it was. Great … no problems … best thing that ever happened … works fine … works great … … no dead spots,” Mr. Craig said when asked for comments he had heard from some of the users of the new system.
Count Dalton Fire Chief Todd Pangle is a believer in the new system.
“There’s no comparison,” he told the Dalton Daily Citizen. “We can talk portable to portable better than we could talk mobile to mobile before. So far, we have found no dead spots for communications. Previously, we had multiple dead spots. Even in residential calls, we would find that guys inside were having trouble communicating with people outside.”
A total of 1,196 radios were installed and are being used by the Whitfield County Sheriff’s Office, Dalton Police Department, Whitfield County Fire Department, Dalton Fire Department, Whitfield County Public Works, Dalton Public Works, 911, EMA, Cohutta, Varnell and Tunnel Hill, District Attorney’s Office and constables.
“This thing didn’t just happen, like, oh, we’re buying a new radio system, OK, open that box, there it is, OK, it’s our new radio system,” Mr. Craig said. “It just didn’t happen that way. There is thousands upon thousands of hours that have gone into this to make it work – from the infrastructure all the way down to training for the end user.”
And the work is not over.
“You’ve got to manage the system on a daily basis,” Mr. Craig said. “It’s not just out there running itself. We’ve got three tower sites we’ve got to maintain, got to keep power on them. Power goes out, you’ve got to have generators, got to make sure the generator runs. If the generator doesn’t run, you’ve got to make sure the UPS (uninterruptible power supply) works. We’ve got to keep power on. You’ve also got to manage the users because everybody has a unique code in their radio. You can’t take my radio and just go do whatever with it – it’s unique to each person. When you push that button, dispatch knows who’s talking.”
Managing the new system is easier, though, since the county joined the Tennessee Valley Radio Communications System (TVRCS), which includes 10 counties in Tennessee and Catoosa, Dade, and Walker counties in Georgia.
“The old system basically consisted of an antenna on a pole and a repeater,” Mr. Craig said, noting that it just broadcast an analog signal out as far as it could to the people that were close enough to receive it. “Be it a telephone pole, a three-legged tower pole, whatever, it was just an antenna and a repeater, and that’s what your system was. The repeater took what you said and repeated it so other users could hear you.”
The new system is much more sophisticated and reliable. “Our new tower at the 911 Center is ‘married’ to the three other tower sites, locally, and then regionally to all the other sites going up to Tennessee and Catoosa, Dade and Walker,” Craig said. “If one tower fails for any reason, the other three would be able to take over. The system would just say, hey, this site’s down, so just use the other three to broadcast the signals. It might even use a tower over in another county if it’s closer to the user.”
Mr. Craig said the original $26 million price tag to replace the old system would have required the county to build 11 tower sites, but by joining the TVRCS, they only had to build three new towers, cutting the cost of the project by more than half. “TVRCS already had a tower on Dug Gap Mountain in Whitfield County that was servicing another county,” he explained, “so we were able to tie onto that one, too.”
Jeff Ownby, deputy director at Whitfield EMA, pointed out that with the old system, each department basically managed its own equipment, which varied from agency to agency. Now everybody uses the same Motorola radios, which will be managed and updated by TVRCS in the coming years.
An advantage to being on the regional system is that Whitfield users can communicate with all the other agencies using it in Georgia and Tennessee, particularly useful during a regional emergency.
“We’ve always offered automatic aid to agencies around us,” Dep. Dir. Ownby said, “but the county fire department just recently signed some agreements to help with both our county and Catoosa and Walker county ISO ratings. Both those counties are on this system. Before, it was a challenge talking to these counties because they were on an 800 megahertz system and we were not. Now we actually have shared fire channels. If we’re responding in Catoosa County, for example, we can talk on their fire channel or even one of their fire ground channels which is immediately issued if there’s a working fire. They can do the same with us.”
More importantly on a daily basis, though, the new system has eliminated virtually all the dead spots in Whitfield County that plagued the old system for years and left first responders sometimes unable to communicate with others.
“We’ve got great coverage now,” Mr. Craig said. “I mean, there’s no question. We checked over 3,000 grids when we were testing the system, and we had only one grid that failed. We went back, and it turned out to be a grid that you couldn’t really drive into. So we did the test again on foot, and it was fine.”
Whitfield County Sheriff’s Office Lt. Gary Stephens says he was recently near the Tennessee state line and was able to talk clearly to dispatch.
“In the previous situation,” he told the Daily Citizen, “I probably would have gone back to my car and used my phone, if I had phone service.”
Lt. Stephens recounted a recent ATV accident in the Chattahoochee National Forest in the northwest section of the county.
“We all went to the first responders channel,” he said. “As I was riding in, we could talk to the firefighters who were there, and in the past there would have been no radio service at all in that area.”
The new system is also encrypted, which means that people with scanners at home can’t hear what’s going on.
“But it means more than that,” Dep. Dir. Ownby said. “What it really means is that you can’t just show up with a radio and start talking on our system. You can’t just buy a radio from Motorola and show up in Whitfield County and say I’m gonna start using the radio system. That’s just not the way it works. It has to be programmed to the specifications of the TVRCS system. That means our system is more secure against attacks from outside users.”
Some two months into the system, Mr. Craig says the bottom line is that the new radios are “exceeding expectations.”
“The coverage is so much better,” he says. “Being able to hear is important in an emergency. You know, seconds count if you’re having a heart attack. If we’re dispatching an ambulance or a fire truck when you’re having a heart attack, if they can’t hear where we’re telling them to go, that costs time.
“Now, it’s…” Mr. Craig says, pausing to snap his fingers, “one time and go. The responders can actually hear the dispatchers give the addresses the first time whereas before it was a crap shoot. Sometimes you might hear it, sometimes you might not.”
Chief Pangle calls the new system a “great investment,” and fellow Whitfield County Fire Chief Ed O’Brien said it’s “exceeding our expectations.”
“I know it cost a lot,” Pangle told the Daily Citizen, “but from my perspective, it was worth every penny, and I really thank the taxpayers and voters for allowing us to make that investment.”
Now there’s definitely no need for those pigeons anymore.
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)
