by Pigeon Patrol | Jun 11, 2015 | Pigeon Patrol's Services, Pigeons in the News
A MYSTERY pink pigeon has been spied in Breightmet.
The bird, which has pink and white plumage, but still has a normal grey head, was spied on a rooftop in Breightmet earlier this morning.
There is a breed of bird called a pink pigeon — called nesoenas mayeri which are native to Mauritius — but these are very rare and normally such a paler shade of pink they are almost white.
David Taylor managed to photograph the unusual bird in Tetbury Drive at about 8am on June 20 and said: “I was having breakfast this morning and saw this red and white pigeon on top of a neighbour’s roof.
“When I went out it was gone but then 15 minutes later I spotted it on a neighbour’s roof.
“I don’t know why it’s that colour, I thought someone had painted it.
Jackie Fish, who also from Tetbury Drive, thought someone had spray painted the bird in the colours of the St George flag.
She spotted it at 7.15pm on June 19, 45 minutes before England kicked off their crucial World Cup match with Uruguay.
She said: “I just saw it there and realised it had been painted white and red, to look like the England flag.
“I have to say as supporting England goes, this is a bit too much and I would class it as cruelty and a bit beyond a joke.”
Gemma Pidluski also reported seeing the bird on June 19 and said on Facebook: “I have just been sitting at home and a pink pigeon has landed on my shed roof. Is it real?
“I have googled it and sure enough there are pink pigeons! Bit of nice news for a change!”
A similar bird was spotted in Ealing, West London in August, 2012 and experts were at a loss to identify 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 six years in a row.
Contact Info: 1- 877– 4– NO-BIRD (www.pigeonpatrol.ca)
by Pigeon Patrol | Jun 2, 2015 | 4-S Gel Bird repellent, Animal Deterrent Products, Bird Deterrent Products, Bird Netting, Pigeons in the News
A BRISTOL photographer has taken a series of striking pictures showing peregrine falcons hunting pigeons in the heart of the city.
Sam Hobson, 34, has captured a collection of pictures showing the birds snatching the pigeons above Bristol’s skyline, according to the Daily Mail.
Mr Hobson said it was ‘amazing’ to capture the birds hunting above his city.
In Britain, they are usually spotted in the skies above mountain ranges and other remote spaces.
Mr Hobson said: ‘There is something amazing about seeing one of the world’s fastest animals perched on a building you see every day,’ he said. ‘There are plenty of tall buildings in cities for the birds to perch on.’
Mr Hobson, who has been tracking and photographing urban falcons in Bristol for the past two years, said the birds had been attracted to the cities because of their large number of pigeons and other migratory birds.
‘I have seen falcons doing things they don’t do in the countryside,’ he said. ‘For example, I witnessed them hunting at night.
‘The falcons were using the city lights to spot other birds and then swooping on them.
‘We are used to seeing nocturnal hunting behavior in owls, but not peregrines.
‘They were hunting different birds as well, not just pigeons. They preyed on a lot of migratory birds.’
He added that March was a good month for photographing the birds – saying: ‘We are coming up to the time when falcons lay their first eggs of the year.
‘Males are particularly territorial during this time, and attack other birds like seagulls which come anywhere near their nests.
‘A couple of years ago two falcons in Bristol only managed to lay one egg, and a seagull knocked it into the floating harbour. Some workmen managed to fish it out with an umbrella, and it was saved.’
Mr Hobson told the Mail, he had captured the falcons from vantage points on high buildings – while carefully observing their nesting habits to determine where they will appear.
‘I stood on top of a car park all day, waiting for something to happen,’ he said.
‘From the pictures you would think these are really active birds, but often I sit there watching them perched on a ledge, digesting their food all day.’
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 Pigeon Patrol | Mar 19, 2015 | 4-S Gel Bird repellent, Animal Deterrent Products, Bird Netting, Pigeon Patrol's Services, Pigeon Spikes, Pigeons in the News
Pigeons have been steady residents of Copenhagen City Hall’s tower for over 100 years, but that has now come to a sad end.
Pigeons have made their home in Copenhagen City Hall’s tower since 1905, but on Tuesday the current flock of around 120 pigeons living in the seat of local government were euthanized after contracting psittacosis, an infection spread through bird droppings.
“There have been pigeons since the City Hall was completed and we have always been proud of that. This is absolutely not something we are happy about,” Kåre Jørgensen, a City Hall spokesman, told DR.
Psittacosis, also known as parrot fever, can also spread to humans and two workers who helped take care of the birds came down with flu-like symptoms but have since been cleared to return to work.
Jørgensen said that although the infection could have been treated, it would have been too hard on the pigeons.
“If we were to [treat them, ed.] it would require that the pigeons be shut up in our tower for four months. The veterinarian determined that that would be a gross violation of the animal’s welfare, so we couldn’t subject them to that,” he told DR.
Jørgensen said officials haven’t yet decided whether they will attempt to repopulate the City Hall tower with a new flock of pigeons. To do so, the dead birds would first have to be removed and the entire tower would have to be disinfected.
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 Pigeon Patrol | Feb 26, 2015 | Animal Deterrent Products, Bird Deterrent Products, Bird Netting, Pigeon Patrol's Services, Pigeon Spikes, Pigeons in the News, UltraSonic Bird Control
Scarecrows have never worked, and history shows that advancements in technology haven’t worked much better when it comes to shooing birds away from ripening crops.
“You set out propane cannons, they’ll habituate. You broadcast predator calls, they’ll learn to ignore them. They’ll even get used to packs of angry wiener dogs,” said Mark Hinders. “About the only things that work to exclude birds are nets, guns and poison. But those are expensive and/or bad manners.”
Hinders, professor of applied science, and John Swaddle, professor of biology, are the core members of the Sonic Nets collaboration at William & Mary. The idea is to produce an effective, non-lethal bird deterrent, a solution to an age-old problem that is affordable, polite and does not rely on a steady supply of irritable dachshunds.
Instead of scaring or even alarming the birds, Sonic Nets works on the annoyance principle. As they dine in a farmer’s field, birds keep up a constant chatter. A device called a parametric array projects a narrow beam of sound to disrupt the birds’ field chatter, which seems to be mainly about the quality of the hors d’oeuvres and the immediate predator situation.
Like a noisy cocktail party
“It’s like the cocktail party problem,” Hinders explained. “You’re in a room and a lot of people are talking and it can be difficult to follow an individual conversation. It doesn’t even have to be especially loud. It’s just that all those other people’s words fill in the empty spaces. And so you go to a quiet room so that you can hear.”
The Sonic Nets collaboration has attracted considerable interest over the years, beginning in 2012, when the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation named the project a Grand Challenges Explorations winner. Additional support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation allowed birdsong expert Dana Moseley to join the collaboration in fall, 2014 as a Mellon postdoctoral fellow.
There also has been considerable movement toward eventual commercialization of Sonic Nets, as well. The collaborators have been discussing options with a group of M.B.A. students at William & Mary’s Raymond A. Mason School of Business under the leadership of Richard Ash, executive director of the Mason School’s Alan B. Miller Center for Entrepreneurship. A patent application for the parametric array system is under consideration, and Sonic Nets has entered into a partnership with Midstream Technology, a Williamsburg firm, to pursue commercial opportunities.
The technology was first tested with starlings in William & Mary’s aviary. Those encouraging results led to a summer of field tests at Fort Eustis. Swaddle explained that the Fort Eustis tests included an examination of a completely different use for the parametric array—minimizing bird-aircraft collisions by chasing birds away from runways. The airfield work is funded by the Virginia Center for Innovative Technology.
“We surveyed bird activity at three places at the airfield four times a week for eight weeks,” Swaddle said. “The first four weeks gave us a baseline of bird activity. During the second four weeks, we deployed our Sonic Net at one of the sites—and recorded an approximate 85 percent reduction in the presence of birds in that area.”
Testing in an open field
The instrumentation shack (left) holds the white rectangular parametric array aimed at the elevated food tray.
They also field-tested the devices in an open field, with the action recorded on video. The video footage from the open-field tests is still being processed, but Swaddle said the airfield data exceeded their expectations. The aviary tests showed that the Sonic Nets reduced the presence of starlings at food by 50 percent. He suggested that the higher success rate at the airfield is probably due to the difference between wariness of wild birds versus captive starlings.
“After our aviary testing, we thought that we would see a stronger effect in the field, but not as strong as we recorded,” Swaddle said. “We think the Sonic Net works because birds can’t hear alarm calls or predators. In the aviary, there isn’t much threat. In the wild, there are plenty of threats and so there is greater need for birds to hear these calls.”
Bird vocalization is much more rich and diverse than calls to alert the flock to the presence of predators or food. Moseley’s Ph.D. research centered on how males use songs to attract potential mates as well as ward off rivals. The breeding-related vocalizations are yet another aspect of the deep aural avian experience.
“It’s interesting to think about how the world of birds is such an acoustic world,” Moseley said. “It can be hard for us to see some little brown bird in a bush. And it’s hard for them to see each other too in a bush or in a forest, or even in a field. The way that they are able to interact with their environment is especially through sound.”
‘Soundscape’ theory
The wide-frequency capabilities of the apparatus open up the potential for “tuning” the Sonic Nets sound to target particular species. Nonlinear acoustics principles incorporated into design of the speakers also allow the operator to “focus” the sound right at the birds, and only the birds.She explained that there is some evidence that “soundscape” is a factor in habitat choice—that birds show a preference for a place where their songs and calls will best resonate. Moseley noted that the Sonic Nets apparatus could be used as research tool to test the soundscape-preference hypothesis, using its wide-frequency range to select sound that would alter the acoustic landscape of a test plot to observe if sound changes the bird’s perception of a habitat.
“If you do it just right you can get that narrow beam of sound to cancel itself out after it propagates a certain distance,” Hinders explained. “This control over where the sound goes allows us to cover a particular region with a blanket of sound. Inside that area the birds can’t communicate, so they leave. Outside that area, nothing—so we don’t generate any noise pollution.”
Graduate student Elizabeth Skinner sets up speakers at an airfield.
Elizabeth Skinner, a Ph.D. student in applied science, is working on simulations of how the sound beams interact with air. Her aim is to fine-tune the controls of the sound, setting the stage for Sonic Nets arrays tailored for specific situations.
“There are some applications where we’re going to want to cover a huge area, and there are others, like on the edge of a golf course, where you’re going to want to cut the sound off before you get to the course itself, so that you don’t bother the golfers,” she said. “My simulations allow us to see where the sounds are going to go before we build the speaker.”
Speakers, described as light sources
The team likes to compare different speaker designs to light sources. A regular speaker, Skinner explained, can be compared to a normal incandescent light bulb, illuminating a room, although diminishing with distance.
“Whereas, a parametric array would be like a flashlight. You can point it, direct it,” she said. “And then the limited parametric array that we’re working on is more like a light saber, where it will just cut off at a certain distance, but up to that distance, you’ll still have that defined beam.”
Sonic Nets is versatile in concept, but one size does not fit all applications. Scaling up—spreading out the sound—is easier than confining the sound to a defined space, Hinders said.
The team is working on variations in speaker design, sound and power source to engineer a Sonic Nets solution to any number of site-specific bird-pest problems. There is an almost limitless variety of bird issues, with consequences ranging from life-and-death to the most trivial of First-World Problems, Hinders said. Each problem poses a different set of engineering challenges.“If we need to cover a sunflower field in North Dakota, we would simply repurpose a stripped-down version of an emergency-alert kind of siren or maybe the PA system for a stadium,” he said. Other agricultural applications might be as small as a portion of an acre or a couple rows of fruit trees, Swaddle added.
“There are particular birds in sub-Saharan Africa that come and eat your rice and make your kids starve, so you want to encourage them to go somewhere else. The new football stadium in Minneapolis happens to be right in the major flyway for lots and lots of birds and apparently they are building this with lots of glass and they have to do something to head off a plague of bird deaths. A technology like this might be just what the NFL needs to avoid yet another run of bad press,” he said. “It could be pigeons pooping on the cars in your parking lot. It could be gulls pooping on your yacht. ”
Next: More testing, more speaker design, more research
Next steps for the project include more extensive field testing, speaker design, various technology-transfer options and getting a better understanding of aspects of both the avian and the human condition. The collaborators stress that they want to be careful to work with people who would use Sonic Nets applications, to understand the bird and the problem it’s causing.
Hinders said the group hopes to introduce use of the technology in resource-poor areas such as sub-Saharan Africa. He has begun leveraging existing contacts, starting with consultations with a young Tanzanian who is about to get a degree in wildlife management, thanks to the support from St. Stephen’s Lutheran Church in Williamsburg.
“The world is in fact that small,” Hinders said. “As we develop this technology, partnering with a small company who intends to make money, we also have in mind the social entrepreneurship angle where we’re solving the actual problem in a place like Tanzania. The engineering challenge is to engineer enough cost and complexity out of it that can actually solve the problem.”
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 Pigeon Patrol | Feb 11, 2015 | 4-S Gel Bird repellent, Animal Deterrent Products, Bird Netting, Pigeon Patrol's Services, Pigeon Spikes, Pigeons in the News
PIGEONS displaced by the demolition of the ABC cinema site in Tunbridge Wells have been causing a messy – and costly – nuisance to the neighbours.
Work to flatten the land began in the summer and it was finished last month.
And while the site on Mount Pleasant and Church Road has been left tidy and boarded up, the pigeons which roosted in the buildings have moved next door to the Pitcher & Piano bar and the Wellington Gate offices.
The ABC cinema has stood empty since it closed in 2000.
Rosemary Ehrler, who is building manager at office building Wellington Gate, told the Courier: “The birds migrated to every other building around. My opinion is they should have been culled before they pulled the building down.
“The problem is now we have a situation where the front of our building is getting covered in pigeon faeces and we have had to call in pest control at our own expense. We are a seven storey building and pest control are coming in next week to remove the mess.
“The whole building will have to be cleaned and they are going to put up something to stop the pigeons landing on the building.
“It’s a fairly expensive business. It’s in the thousands. Then the pigeons will just move on to another building.” said Mrs Ehrler.
She said the pigeon problem started as soon as the cinema was demolished.
“There aren’t hundreds of birds but it’s a fairly large flock and it doesn’t take many to create a mess. They tend to like the ledges on the front of the building and the mess spreads down the front of the building and on the windows. I know Pitcher & Piano had their pest control, so they’ve spent moneytoo,” she added.
At the Pitcher & Piano next door in Church Road, supervisor Liam Turner said: “It was when they knocked down the actual cinema. They were nesting in there and as soon as they started work they were everywhere. There must be hundreds of them.”
Mr Turner said the alleyway at the side of his building was a fire escape and it was “very, very messy because of the pigeons” and that the birds were nesting on top of their coolant fans.
He added: “It’s causing us hassle. It will cost a lot of money to get the problem solved. The company has to do it regardless. Our building is quite inaccessible so we’re trying to come up with a plan to get rid of them. We’d need a lot of netting. It’s such a big job, they need to pick the right time.”
Mr Turner said he had had to jetwash the delivery area because the delivery man had complained about it. Even the Town Hall was affected by the displaced pigeons.
A council spokesman said: “There are pigeon deterrents on the Town Hall including some replica owls looking down from the roof. We did see an increase in birds after the cinema came down and installed some additional deterrents which seem to have worked.”
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)
