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Pigeon flies past broadband in data speed race

by Pigeon Patrol | Apr 18, 2023 | Bird Spike, Pigeon Predators, Pigeon Spikes, Pigeons, Pigeons in the News, Raccoons, Sparrows, UltraSonic Bird Control

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’.”

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Homing pigeon faster than Internet? In S. Africa, the answer’s yes.

by Pigeon Patrol | Apr 18, 2023 | Bird Spike, Pigeon Spikes, Pigeons, Pigeons in the News, Raccoons, Sparrows, UltraSonic Bird Control

Sometimes 12th-century technology wins.

This week, a South African call-center business, frustrated by persistently slow Internet speeds, decided to use a carrier pigeon named Winston to transfer 4 gigabytes of data between two of its offices, just 50 miles apart. At the same time, a computer geek pushed a button on his computer to send data the old-fashioned way, through the Internet.

Winston the pigeon won. It wasn’t even close.

“Winston arrived after two hours, six minutes, and 57 seconds,” says Kevin Rolfe, head of the information technology department at Unlimited Group, a call-center business based in Durban. As for the Internet data transfer, he says, “when we finally stopped the computer, about 100 megs had transferred, which is about 4 percent of the total.”

Officially, the Unlimited Group has not given up on the Internet, nor has it any plans to embrace the use of homing pigeons that was pioneered on the battlefield by Genghis Khan. But while the pigeon-versus-Internet stunt was a resounding success in terms of satire, it also makes a point that many businesses throughout Africa are making: Africans pay some of the highest prices for some of the least reliable Internet service in the world. And if a country like South Africa – relatively prosperous and developed – can’t solve this problem, then it’s going to need a lot more pigeons.

In most parts of Africa, Internet service is provided by satellite transmission dishes, an expensive and unreliable option. Go to an Internet cafe in Kinshasa or Khartoum, and you’ll see dozens of earnest students and businessmen, typing out messages, pushing the send button, and then hoping the power doesn’t go out before the message gets sent.

Your humble correspondent in Africa last year attempted to send about one minute of digital video of displaced people in Kenya to his headquarters in Boston, through the so-called broadband Internet service provided at his Nairobi hotel. Six hours later, there was still an hourglass icon on his screen, with a message that simply read “sending.”

Undersea cable brings broadband to some

In theory, Africa’s problems are already well on their way to being solved. A $650 million undersea cable, linking the Kenyan port city of Mombasa with a larger sea cable system servicing Asia, was officially activated in late July of this year, bringing most major cities in East Africa their first taste of high-speed broadband Internet. But three months later, local Internet service providers have refused to drop their prices, offering increased bandwidth at the same price.

Some African nations have gone all-out to get the most bang out of the cable. Rwanda, for instance, has extended a high-speed fiber-optic cable network to every district and every major town in the country in anticipation of the cable, in hopes of turning itself into an information-technology hub like Singapore. Others, like South Africa, have been updating their systems, but can’t keep up with the exploding demand.

Which brings us back to Winston the pigeon. Mr. Rolfe says the idea for the pigeon race came from a member of his IT department, who remembered an April Fool’s joke of sending data by homing pigeons. After one too many incidents of a dropped line or a failed transfer, one IT tech finally blurted out, “We should just use pigeons.”

Taking a cue from former empires

As unusual as the idea sounds today, pigeons have been a powerful tool for empires, financial and otherwise. In the mid-19th century Paul Julius Reuter (founder of the Reuters news agency) used pigeons to send stock information between the cities of Aachen and Brussels, until telegraph service eventually replaced them. And as recently as World War I the British admiralty used pigeons to send battlefield information. (The Germans, predictably, trained falcons to intercept messages.)

Never a company to do things in half-measures, Unlimited Group began to promote its Pigeon Race 2009 on its website. Winston the pigeon soon had his own Facebook fan page, a website with training videos, and yes, Winston began to tweet. On Twitter. When Winston finally landed at the offices in Durban – risking hawks, gun-happy hunters, and high-winds – the results were carried by newspapers, TV stations, and were a huge sensation in the Twittersphere.

Winston’s feat illustrates larger problem

Perhaps stung by the pigeon experiment, South Africa’s giant communications company, Telkom, issued a statement to the South African Press Agency explaining that it was not to blame for Unlimited Group’s slow internet service.

“Telkom would like to clarify that the company cannot be blamed for this particular customer’s lack of throughput speeds,” Troy Hector, Telkom’s head of ICT, wrote to Sapa in an e-mail. “Several recommendations have, in the past, been made to the customer but none of these have, to date, been accepted. It must also be noted that Telkom is not the customer’s core service provider.”

Rolfe insists that the pigeon experiment was not aimed at any one particular company, but rather at the common problem that Internet have: slow Internet speed. A customer like Unlimited Group, which transmits an average of 500 megabytes of data per day, can’t afford to have unreliable connectivity.

“Look, we don’t blame Telkom or Neotel, or any of the other Internet providers,” says Rolfe. “Those guys, the providers are doing the best job that they can. But we are saying, fine, let’s sit down and think out of the box and figure out how to improve South Africa’s telecommunications.”

As for Winston, Rolfe says the pigeon is in no danger of losing his job. “He still goes out on training runs,” Rolfe says, especially when the computer lines are down. “Using pigeons, it’s not the optimal plan,” he chuckles. “But we may do it from time to time, to give Winston some airtime.”

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Homing in on city’s pigeon problem

by Pigeon Patrol | Mar 23, 2023 | Bird Spike, Pigeon Predators, Pigeon Spikes, Pigeons, Pigeons in the News, Raccoons, Sparrows, UltraSonic Bird Control

Among the most famous images of London’s Trafalgar Square is one of people feeding pigeons in its grounds. And closer to home, feeding these birds was a favourite pastime on the weekends around the Vidhana Soudha, when people flocked to it for a bit of relaxation in its gardens. But no more, as the pigeons are now as numerous in most parts of the city as they were once around it.

Far from feeding them, people have now taken to shooing them away as they invade their balconies and kitchens, building nests and dirtying them with their poop and feathers. Their numbers have become their downfall as they are no longer priced as pets either. Instead they are the flying rats of urban Bengaluru.

Observes one fed up Bengalurean, industrialist, Narendra Kumar, “Pigeons have adapted so well to our urban civilisation that they are driving other birds away. Cleaning pigeon droppings has become a huge problem today. People in high- rise buildings are the worst affected and even the plants on the balconies suffer as a result of their invasion.”

But what’s worse, the pigeon droppings are not just an eyesore, but also a health hazard, warn wildlife experts. With the pigeon population growing, they have been spreading diseases like avian influenza and castle fever through their droppings, according to them. “ The pigeon droppings contain bacteria and fungus, which can cause major lung disorders that can be fatal,” they explain.

It is also claimed that those who fall sick as a result of the pigeon droppings, find recovery hard despite downing antibiotics, because of the strong infection they transmit. Bird lovers too admit to being on their guard when it comes to these birds because of the infections and diseases they transmit.

The BBMP , which has received numerous complaints from people about the pigeon menace, is now planning to hold a meeting with wildlife experts, bird lovers , health experts and concerned citizens to deal with it, says Mr Sarfaraz Khan, BBMP joint commissioner (health).

The civic agency is reportedly considering taking a cue from other countries, which have effectively dealt with the growing population of pigeons without harming the ecology and is also planning a study on their impact on humans, animals and other bird species.

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

Pigeon droppings health risk – should you worry?

by Pigeon Patrol | Mar 23, 2023 | Bird Spike, Pigeon Predators, Pigeon Spikes, Pigeons, Pigeons in the News, Raccoons, Sparrows, UltraSonic Bird Control

Pigeons are highly social animals and are incredibly smart creatures. But did you know pigeons carry many diseases and parasites linked to their droppings? When pigeons start roosting on your property, they will rapidly create a vast mess with their poop. Not only are pigeon droppings in your home disgusting, but they can carry major risks to your wellbeing and can cause havoc on your property. However, the danger varies depending on the invasion. If you have a pigeon invasion on your property, there is a huge risk of your family members contracting illnesses from their droppings. Histoplasmosis, Candidiasis, Cryptococcosis, Psittacosis, Encephalitis, and Salmonellosis are some of the deadly diseases spread through pigeon droppings. The safe bet is to handle your pigeon invasion quickly by calling a professional pest control company to eradicate any risk of disease.

In addition to the disease and infection, pigeons can also carry parasites, ticks, and mites. A dead pigeon is more of a breeding ground for flies and pests. We at Accurate Pest Control believe, the more established the pigeon infestation, the more significant danger of having these pests getting into your property.

How hazardous are Pigeon droppings?

When an individual breaths dust or water droplets of contaminated bird droppings, it can cause several diseases, including aflu-like illness known as Psittacosis.
Salmonella is a bacterial virus that can cause Diarrhea. Pigeons with this type of bacteria can spread it through their droppings.
One must take safety measures when they are cleaning up or come in contact with pigeon droppings. Make sure to rinse your hands and clean any bare skin before eating, drinking, or placing your hands near your mouth. Similarly, if you are feeding or handling birds, wash your hands afterwards.
Individuals with a compromised immune system, like HIV/AIDS or cancer, must avoid cleaning the droppings as it can be fatal.

How can you catch it?

Anyone can become affected if he/she breathes it in. The infant who died at the hospital in Glasgow, Scotland, had been exposed to the fungus. Experts reveal the apparent source has been traced to a room on the rooftop of the hospital.
Bird feces and feathers can disturb your home’s heating and cooling modules and indoor air quality.
Pigeon droppings contaminated with bacteria or viruses are often left on the windowsills and cars to dry out.

The best thing you can do to get rid of your pigeon problem is to call licensed pest control in San Antonio, Texas. Our Wildlife animal control in San Antonio uses proper techniques to keep your home or business free from unwanted critters and ensure that these creatures are removed safely. To improve the situation, you must ensure all areas are properly cleaned, and preventive measures are taken to stop the birds from invading your home/property.

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Rock pigeons are to be admired — as long as you’re not underneath the ‘bomb-bay doors’

by Pigeon Patrol | Mar 16, 2023 | Bird Spike, Pigeon Predators, Pigeon Spikes, Pigeons, Pigeons in the News, Raccoons, Sparrows, UltraSonic Bird Control

Heading to his usual Sunday morning yoga class in Leslieville a few years ago, my husband, Peter, gave silent thanks when he found a sent-from-above parking spot right in front of the studio. He quickly eased his black Honda Fit, Jellybean, into the space and dashed to his class.

When Peter came out an hour and a half later, his car was so coated in poop he barely recognized it. “It looked like a bunch of elephants with wings had flown over my car and relieved themselves,” he said.

There were no pachyderms to be seen. Pigeons? Yes. Right above Jellybean a couple of hydro wires sagged under the weight of dozens of the city birds. There was only one thing to do. Peter drove straight to the old-timey car wash at Parliament and Front and paid the price to have the carapace of excrement removed. Twice.

Then there was the time our son’s girlfriend, Lisa, got pooped on at the bus stop at Lower Gerrard and Coxwell as she waited for her northbound bus to the subway. This stop is notorious for its pigeon problem and Lisa knew to be vigilant. But on this particular day she was running late for work, on her phone and not paying attention to the birds lined up like so many grey bombers in formation above her. When the bomb-bay doors opened, the blast hit her freshly washed hair. Thinking quickly, she dashed into one of the restaurants in Little India, washed the mess out and continued on her way.

Just another day trying to coexist peacefully with pigeons, the birds first dubbed “rats with wings” by New York City parks commissioner Thomas Hoving in 1966.

I didn’t think too much more about my family members’ run-ins with the tubby birds known officially as rock pigeons and formerly as rock doves. But a few weeks ago, our daughter, Em, mentioned that a family of pigeons had been hanging out on the peaked roof outside her bedroom window. That got my attention. In the more than 20 years we’ve lived here, none of us had ever seen a pigeon on any part of our roof.

Then a couple of nights ago, when I had my bedroom window open to allow the sweet-smelling evening breezes in, I heard faint noises that sounded like the scritch-scratch of bubble-gum pink feet moving about in our eavestroughs.

The next day, I decided to see if I could get a look at the pigeons. It turns out I didn’t need special clearance from MI6 to spy on them through Em’s window. Far from flying off in a furious flap of wings as I neared the glass, they were thoroughly unperturbed by my approach.

There were three pigeons, all about the same size. A close look revealed two were fledglings and the third was an adult. The youngsters skittered up and down our grey roof tiles, pursuing their parent for food. Once they made contact, they pushed their beaks into their parent’s bill, as if to say, “Come on! We know you’ve got our crop milk in there.” But the adult was having none of it; its parental contract for food delivery had already ended.

Until I started reading about the birds on our roof, I had taken the common pigeon, Columba livia, for granted. I thought of them as birds that had always been here, part of the everyday fabric of city life.

While it’s true rock pigeons have been associated with humans for many thousands of years, they haven’t always been in North America. They didn’t reach this continent until the early 1600s. Prior to this, rock pigeons were natural residents of Eurasia and North Africa, where their wild nests could be found in narrow crevices plentiful in sea cliffs, caves and canyons.

The latter fact explains why these birds have fared so well in both the New and Old Worlds. Wherever humans have created towns and cities, places with man-made structures that emulate cliffs, rock pigeons have found a home.

Beyond being evolutionarily successful, rock pigeons are beautiful birds with a regal carriage. Sure, they poop a lot. And it can be hazardous to park or walk under a flock of these birds on a wire. Step carefully, I say, and admire their shimmering, iridescent plumage.

And what of the birds on our roof? When I looked out Em’s window this morning, only the adult pigeon was there; the fledglings, rebuffed, had finally departed. A single small white feather remained on the tiles, a reminder of the pigeon family that was.

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Lost pigeon flew the coop, finding her way from France to Calgary

by Pigeon Patrol | Mar 16, 2023 | Bird Spike, Pigeon Spikes, Pigeons, Pigeons in the News, Raccoons, Sparrows, UltraSonic Bird Control

Homing pigeons are a remarkable species with internal compasses that are able to memorize landmarks to retrace a path home. But one particular bird ended up so far off its course, it would have been a miracle for her to find her way back.

After being found frozen to a front porch, she was taken in by Calgarian Alex Gray who didn’t know what else to do and posted on social media, eventually tracking down Jeanie Palmer, a woman who raises and rescues pigeons.

“There were a lot of people who wanted the bird but couldn’t prove it was theirs, so I reached out to Jeanie and I said: ‘Alright, we don’t have traction and she doesn’t seem happy by herself, so by all means, come and get her,’” Gray said.

Once Palmer got her home she did some digging and, being a member of the Canadian Pigeon Fancier’s Association, she reached out to her fellow fanciers who helped her identify the tag.

She’s from the Netherlands and belonged to Henk Bax, a man who races pigeons.

“He said, this bird went missing from a race in Vervins, France on April 25, 2021. She was 200 kilometres from the coop and a year-and-a-half later she winds up on the sidewalk in Calgary, Alberta,” Palmer said.

The Dutch owner gave his blessing to keep the pigeon.

“How would you fly from France all the way here? How would she make that? I don’t think she could have made it that far, kudos to her if she did,” Palmer said.

“There’s a reason we named her Amelia Earhart, maybe she did fly here,” Palmer said.

“My jaw dropped,” Gray said.

Both could hardly believe it.

“This could be a book. The bird who flew across the world, or the pigeon who got lost. You could make up any adventures you wanted her to be on. The fact I have her is crazy to me, pretty lucky,” Palmer said.

She’s retiring from racing and will officially become a Canadian. It isn’t legal to ship a bird from Canada to the Netherlands.

“She’s going to join my coop and be a spoiled lazy pigeon. Hopefully she will pick one of my handsome boys and have a happy little family of her own,” Palmer said.

Source

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

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Next Entries »

Pigeon flies past broadband in data speed race

Homing pigeon faster than Internet? In S. Africa, the answer’s yes.

Homing in on city’s pigeon problem

Pigeon droppings health risk – should you worry?

How hazardous are Pigeon droppings?

How can you catch it?

Rock pigeons are to be admired — as long as you’re not underneath the ‘bomb-bay doors’

Lost pigeon flew the coop, finding her way from France to Calgary

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