PANAJI: Pigeon population is growing in the city without any growth in awareness among the people that pigeon droppings can cause a lung-related disease.
According to a Mumbai-based news report, dried droppings of pigeons contain spores, which if inhaled may lead to respiratory illness. Their faecal matter is highly acidic and can destroy buildings and monuments.
The report has further adds that daily exposure to pigeons can lead to progressive symptoms like irreversible lung fibrosis and even death.
People feed pigeons as charity, for religious reasons or fun or just because others are doing so, but contact with their droppings could pose a health risk.
Hypersensitivity pneumonitis, a human disease, is known to be caused by repetitive inhalation of antigenic agents found in pigeon droppings.
A lack of awareness on how pigeon droppings can be a health hazard can become a hurdle in diagnosis for doctors.
A well-fed pigeon on an average dispenses up to 11.5 kg of droppings a year. The pigeons are often found sitting on TV antennas, atop AC units, window sills, housetops, eaves, power lines, and in ducts and vents.
They often make nests in buildings and rapidly reproduce. Pigeon droppings are often found deposited on park benches, statues, and cars, and are an aesthetic problem.
To bird lovers, pigeons are hardy survivors in a concrete city; many feel that caring for pigeons is a humane thing to do. But, to households, corporations housed in gleaming high rises and health experts, these birds are pests that test ‘our commitment to cleanliness and disease control.’
There is no NGO taking care of the birds like pigeons, like some NGOs care for dogs, and surprisingly none of the government authorities – forest department and animal husbandry department have woken up to the pigeon menace.
The forest department claimed of not receiving a single complaint of pigeon menace in the city, but urged the residents to avoid feeding pigeons that can backfire, resulting in a serious menace.
An official said that residents need to take long-term measures by blocking their nesting sites and installing ultra sonic sound system to frighten them up.
The CCP said that they do not have any measures to put curbs on unregulated bird feeding that increases pest menace as such food meant for pigeons invariably attracts rats.
Pigeon-feeding stations are slowly mushrooming in the city. It gets started with feeding the birds with grains and leftover food; and while the flock grows larger, another station emerges a little away on the other side of the road. Often we find pavements and roads with mounds of uneaten grains, bread and rice, which attract other animals too.
In the city, one see some major pigeon-feeding stations near Rameshwar Lodge, Hotel Nova Goa, Hotel Kamat, municipal garden, behind Rebello building, new CCP market area and Tonca near Thomas Garage.
These birds are known to return to the place where they are fed and, according to some studies, organise their day around feeding.
Bird experts feel that unregulated practice of feeding and enough spots for nesting are the main reasons for the pigeon population explosion. The other reason being the absence of natural predators.
“The issue of their population has arose as people started leaving grains and food for them. They no longer have to make an effort to find food and a good nesting area, which has made them prolific breeders,” said president of Goa Bird Conservation Network, Parag Rangnekar, who is involved in bird conservation efforts.
“Unless there is a study done to prove that pigeon droppings cause incidences of respiratory problem then it is wrong to blame pigeons for that,” he added.
A resident of Tonca, Ismail Nawar, called for a plan to control the pigeon population.
“People should also be discouraged from feeding pigeons in public places,” Nawar said, adding that it is the only way to prevent overfeeding.
Sanjay Sarmalkar, from St Inez, said that not only are the bird droppings are health hazard, they also do some serious damage to vehicle paint.
“I have to daily wash my car which remains covered with droppings, otherwise, these acidic and grainy droppings can stain and take the gloss off the paint if left for too long,” Sarmalkar 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.
Circle Line services were out of action after netting to stop pigeons nestling on the tracks collapsed at High Street Kensington at around 4.25pm. A train in front of the netting, and the entire station, was evacuated.One enraged user tweeted: “It is absurd that some obstruction whatever it may be is causing an entire line to go down!”A Transfort for London (TFL) spokesman said that services were slowly making a recovery after the track was reopened at 5.12pm.The spokesman told the Daily Star Online: “It was some netting that fell from the roof of the station and on to the tracks and I think it was as a train was approaching.”Obviously we can’t have trains running on netting.
Due to a reported emergency just evacuated from train at High Street Kensington. Mayhem.
“High Street Kensington has reopened as of 5.12pm so trains are running through the stations without any problems.”As of 5.35pm, there are still severe delays between Earls Court station and Edgware Road on the District Line.There are minor delays on the remainder of the District Line.There is still severe delays on the Circle Line.
The spokesman added: “There were no injuries to passengers and staff.”
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.
At first the whole thing seemed preposterous. No way this could happen. Tom Roden, 66 at the time, was standing at the door of his home near Manchester, England. “I was just setting out on a walk with my dog when I saw him,” he told a reporter. “I recognized him straight away because of his white tail feathers.”
It was a pigeon. His pigeon. It had been missing for five years. Suddenly it was back. Why? And where were the tens of thousands of pigeons that vanished with him?
It had a name: Champion Whitetail. In 1997, Roden had sent Whitetail and a bunch of other racing birds to France, 430 miles south, to compete in the Royal Pigeon Association’s centenary cross-Channel competition, a major long-distance pigeon race with cash prizes that attracted 60,000 bird entries. The contestants, quietly cooing, were brought to a field near Nantes and released at 6:30 in the morning—that was the race’s motto: “At dawn we go.”
At the signal the birds took flight and, following a deep pigeon instinct, dashed at speeds as high as 50 miles an hour straight back toward their roosts, or “lofts,” all across England. This is something pigeons do. It’s called a homing instinct, and even though many of these animals had never been to France before, didn’t recognize the land below them, and had to cross a wide channel of ocean water before finding the house or roof or backyard from which they came, normally most of these racers would have find their way home.
Whitetail was expected to arrive early, because he was a champion. He’d already won 13 races in his lifetime, had flown across the English Channel 15 times, and had finished the Central Southern Classic from Lessay in northern France against a field of 3,026 birds with the winning time. He was a bird to watch.
So on Sunday, June 29, 1997, Roden was doing just that—waiting at home and watching for Whitetail, who could be expected to land at, well, Roden was hoping for a 2 p.m. or so arrival. Maybe earlier. He waited. And waited.
But Whitetail didn’t show.
A few of Roden’s birds did arrive later that day—but not Whitetail. The same thing was happening all over England. Tens of thousands of birds belonging to hundreds of English pigeon racers never made it home. They simply disappeared. There’d been no storm on the Channel, no ferocious headwinds, no giant gusts, nothing that would explain why so many birds would suddenly vanish. Where did they go?
The newspapers dubbed this “The Great Pigeon Race Disaster.” And for the next five years nobody could say what happened until Roden, standing at his front door, saw Whitetail calmly land right there in front of him. Could it be, he wondered? So he went and checked the ring attached to one of the pigeon’s legs, “and his ring number confirmed I was right.”
Whitetail was back. “I was absolutely amazed,” Roden told the Manchester papers. “He must have a phenomenal memory to recognize his way home after all this time.” For a 16-year-old pigeon, he looked spry and healthy. Pigeons tell no tales, of course, but his reappearance meant whatever it was that pushed tens of thousands of pigeons off course hadn’t killed them all. More than a few scientists were curious.
When they checked, not only was the weather on that day in 1997 largely clear—with no sudden changes in barometric pressure, no unusual fogs, no interference in the magnetic field (which pigeons use to navigate)—but nothing obvious seemed amiss.
That’s when a geophysicist at the U.S. Geological Survey, John Hagstrum, had an idea. What if birds navigate by hearing sounds we humans can’t? Earlier experiments had shown that pigeons can hear tones 11 octaves below middle C—that’s way, way below our human range. What might they be hearing?
Here’s a hint: Jennifer Ackerman, in her new book The Genius of Birds, describes another bird mystery. This one took place in eastern Tennessee.
It was April 2014, and researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, were testing whether a population of tiny golden-winged warblers … could carry geolocators on their backs. The birds had arrived only in the past day or two after a 3,000-mile journey north from their wintering grounds in Columbia. The team had just attached the gizmos to the tiny warblers when all the birds suddenly flew the coop, spontaneously evacuating their nesting grounds.
Where’d they go? Why would so many birds all scatter at the same time? Ackerman says that later scientists learned that a gigantic spring storm, a supercell, was heading toward Tennessee at that very moment—one that “would spawn eighty-four tornadoes and kill thirty-five people.” When it was still 250 to 500 miles away, the warblers seemed to hear it coming—the deep rumble of storm reached them, and so the birds scattered, flying every which way, even as far as Cuba. When the storm passed, they all returned and began to breed.
Can birds hear subtle changes wafting long distance through the air? John Hagstrum thinks they can. Not just warblers, but, in our case, pigeons may be able to sense soft, low background noises—the sounds of swells in the ocean, the swishswash of waves, changes in air pressure—and can read those sounds as they bounce, wavelike, off hillsides, cliffs and other steep terrain. “Similar to the way we see a landscape,” Hagstrum told Ackerman, “I think birds are hearing it.” These low, low natural sounds are carried on “infrasound waves.” Those waves exist. That we know. They may help birds read the map below them and teach them how to find their way home.
Thinking about the Great Pigeon Race Disaster, Hagstrum noted that our 60,000 pigeons were heading north from Nantes in France at speeds varying from 20 to 50 miles per hour. The fastest birds, he figures, might have reached the Channel Crossing on or about 11 a.m. that day as they headed to their various homes in England.
Could something have interfered with their ability to “hear” and “read” the terrain below? Something unexpected? Violent? Different?
Hagstrum cast about and noticed that on the day of the race, the fastest commercial airliner in the world, a Concorde supersonic transport (SST) just happened—at 11:20 to 11:30 that morning—to be flying across the birds’ flight path along the English Channel. The Concorde SST in its day was an impressive piece of engineering. It flew so high that passengers could look out the window and see the sky above darkening, glimpsing the edge of space. It traveled at twice the speed of sound (1,354 miles per hour) and so could make the trip from Paris to New York in just three and a half hours. It was also beautiful …
… but a Concorde in flight leaves its mark—in sound. As the plane gathered speed once it broke the sound barrier at 750 miles per hour, it would have created a shock wave that would have traveled quickly and widely back toward the ground—and back toward those pigeons. The pigeons would have noticed.
Any jet moving through the air faster than the speed of sound creates a shock, laying down, says Hagstrum, “a sonic boom carpet” almost a hundred miles wide that would certainly have, as Ackerman writes, obliterated “the pigeons’ navigational, acoustic map, completely disorienting them.”
If Hagstrum’s idea proves true, we can imagine what happened on that day. The birds took off, heading north toward England. The Concorde took off, heading east toward America. When the birds and plane crossed paths, the sonic boom trailing off the Concorde so discombobulated the pigeons that, like the Tennessee warblers, they scattered in every direction, flying east, west, north, and maybe even south again, back to Nantes.
Which brings us back to Whitetail. We now know where our champion pigeon spent at least the beginning of his missing five years.
A few weeks after Whitetail’s return, a letter arrived at Roden’s house, addressed to “Monsieur Tom Roden, Interested in Pigeons, Hattersley, England.” It came from Jean Bouchard, resident of Nantes, who wrote that sometime on the day of the cross-Channel race in 1997, he walked into his small garden and found, sitting there, exhausted, a pigeon.
The pigeon had a ring with a number on it. Bouchard wrote down the number and decided to keep the bird for a while, until it “built up its strength.” He built him a birdcage “to protect him from neighbour’s cats” and then, several weeks later, took him to the local natural history museum, where he presumes the pigeon was released.
When, years later, Whitetail’s return to Manchester hit the Internet, Bouchard saw the story, compared ring numbers, and wrote Roden: I’m the guy who found your champion. Your bird was my bird.
Which leaves me wondering: How come this pigeon, which had outpaced thousands of competitors and crossed the Channel 15 times without a hitch, ended up dazed and exhausted a few miles from the start of his race? Had he gotten sick? Or had he gone hundreds of miles north, hit a shock wave, lost his bearings, reversed direction, and ended back where he started?
We can’t ask him. Even if pigeons could talk, Whitetail was 16 when he returned to England. That’s extremely old for a homing pigeon, even a domesticated one. I imagine Whitetail is beyond talk now. Concordes aren’t flying any more. Tens of thousands of pigeons remain missing. Were they sonic-boomed? Maybe. Where did they go? Nobody really knows, but closing my eyes, here’s what I see …
… An old pair of pigeons, long past their racing days, are hobbling along a busy Polish sidewalk. They have a strange fondness for fish and chips, and when I listen very closely (at 11 octaves below middle C), I sometimes catch them humming snatches from “God Save the Queen.” They seem a little confused.
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.
Humans could become better at switching between tasks – such as shifting from emailing to taking a phone call – if they behaved more like pigeons and stopped thinking about what they are doing, research by psychologists at the University of Exeter suggests.
In an experiment that compared humans’ ability to switch between tasks with that of pigeons, the researchers found that while the birds’ way of learning to do tasks associatively caused no decrease in accuracy, humans incurred costs, in that they were slower and made more mistakes when they stopped doing one thing and started doing another.
The work of PhD student Christina Meier and Professors Stephen Lea and Ian McLaren, which was published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Learning and Cognition, has been highlighted in the American Psychological Association’s series of ‘Particularly Exciting Experiments in Psychology’ (known as “PeePs”) this week (June 9).
A large body of research has shown that people are faster and more accurate when they repeat the same task than when they switch between tasks. This experiment showed that pigeons who learnt a task associatively by means of Pavlovian conditioning were able to switch between tasks without slowing down or making more errors.
Lead author Christina Meier said: “We looked at why humans make more errors when they move between two different tasks whereas pigeons don’t. Pigeons don’t analyse what they see. If they experienced a given situation before, the pigeons will repeat the behaviour that had the best outcome for them in those previous encounters. Humans don’t do this, we use rules. We make things complicated.”
Professor McLaren said: “We are not saying that pigeons are super clever. What this research shows is that we can teach pigeons to swap between tasks at no cost to their efficiency, and that they appear to be doing it without what psychologists call “executive control”. We suspect humans have access to this associative solution to the problem too and this has educational implications, skills implications and implications for our understanding of human behaviour.”
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.
Humans could be more efficient if they learnt from pigeons and stopped thinking about what they are doing, according to scientists.
Switching between making a phone call and writing an email led to more mistakes as humans stopped doing one thing and started another.
Scientists at the University of Exeter carried out research to compare a human’s ability to switch between tasks with that of pigeons.
They found that while the birds’ way of learning to do tasks associatively caused no decrease in accuracy, humans incurred costs – in that they were slower and made more mistakes when they switched tasks.
Previous studies have shown that people are faster and more accurate when they repeat the same task than when they do something different.
The work of PhD student Christina Meier and professors Stephen Lea and Ian McLaren revealed that pigeons who learnt a task associatively by means of Pavlovian conditioning were able to switch between tasks without slowing down or making more errors.
Ms Meier, the lead author, said: “We looked at why humans make more errors when they move between two different tasks whereas pigeons don’t. Pigeons don’t analyse what they see.
“If they experienced a given situation before, the pigeons will repeat the behaviour that had the best outcome for them in those previous encounters. Humans don’t do this, we use rules. We make things complicated.”
Prof McLaren said: “We are not saying that pigeons are super clever. What this research shows is that we can teach pigeons to swap between tasks at no cost to their efficiency, and that they appear to be doing it without what psychologists call ‘executive control’.
“We suspect humans have access to this associative solution to the problem too and this has educational implications, skills implications and implications for our understanding of human behaviour.”
The study, Task-Switching in Pigeons: Associative Learning or Executive Control?, is published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Learning and Cognition.
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.
A lonely woman who ignored a council order to stop feeding the pigeons in her garden must pay a £640 fine and £1,729 court costs.
Katherine Spiller, 66, said the birds were “a bit of company”, but attracted so many that neighbours complained.
Spiller, from Oxford, admitted breaking a community protection order.
The lonely woman fed pigeons in her garden for 20 years so that they could keep her company.
Pensioner Katherine Spiller began inviting the birds into her garden in 1995 by throwing seed from her bathroom window.
The 66-year-old attracted large flocks of pigeons – which are recognised as a pest in the UK – as well as smaller garden birds to keep her company.
However, over the past two decades the former librarian and administrator has amassed complaints from fed-up neighbours who can’t stand the birds which defecate on their property and dominate the garden walls like a scene from an Alfred Hitchcock movie.
Spiller has also caused a flap among shoppers in Oxford city centre where she has also been spreading the seed.
As a result, dozens of pigeons would descend daily onto the street near picturesque and historic Magdalen College as well as other locations across the city.
Following a growing number of complaints, Oxford City Council stepped in 12 months ago and ordered her to stop.
Despite this, the “habitual bird feeder” was put before magistrates again after ignoring the order between August and October last year.
Magistrates in Oxford were shown dozens of pictures of the birds sitting on the roof and ledges of Spiller’s terraced house as well as sitting on her neighbours buildings.
Jeremy Franklin, representing Oxford City Council, told magistrates that neighbours had reported her continuing to put out bird seed.
Mr Franklin added: “The defendant is an habitual feeder of birds, mostly pigeons, which congregate around her house in large numbers, causing a certain amount of distress and antagonism to the neighbours.
“The warning notice required the defendant to cease dropping bird seed or foodstuffs that would encourage birds, vermin or other animals in her garden or anywhere and to keep her garden free from weeds and plants providing shelter to vermin and other animals.
“Despite the imposition of the notice, the defendant was found to have breached it by continuing to feed the pigeons.”
Mr Franklin said the city council might have to take further action to stop Spiller from feeding the pigeons unless she could change her habits.
He added: “Those charged with dealing with this problem are at their wits end.”
A spokesman for Oxford City Council said after the hearing that neighbours were unable to use their gardens in the summer months because of the birds perching and defecating in the gardens. He added that a nuisance was being caused by bird flying into windows.
Spiller had sent a letter to the court, admitting she had failed to comply with a community protection notice and the court clerk revealed it was “very, very rambling” and mainly consisted of “poems that have been written by Ms Spiller”.
The panel of magistrates handed Spiller, who did not attend the hearing, a fine of £640 for breaching the community protection order handed out in February last year. She was also ordered to pay a £64 victim surcharge and £1,729 prosecution costs.
Speaking from her home, the keen poet said: “The birds like being fed but now you can’t feed them in town. You can’t even feed the ducks.
“There was not the same law in place at the time when I first began feeding them in 1995. I think it is a wicked law and it makes it hard on the pigeons.
“They could be an amenity for people who lack a bit of company. I don’t have a partner or children so the pigeons were my only company, and people do look for company in the pigeons.”
Spiller, who wrote a poem in 1997 entitled Pigeon Woman which reflects on her own experiences of feeding the birds, added that she would remain hopeful for the future that the law on feeding the pigeons would change.
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.
PANAJI: Pigeon population is growing in the city without any growth in awareness among the people that pigeon droppings can cause a lung-related disease.
Circle Line services were out of action after netting to stop pigeons nestling on the tracks collapsed at High Street Kensington at around 4.25pm. A train in front of the netting, and the entire station, was evacuated.One enraged user tweeted: “It is absurd that some obstruction whatever it may be is causing an entire line to go down!”
At first the whole thing seemed preposterous. No way this could happen. Tom Roden, 66 at the time, was standing at the door of his home near Manchester, England. “I was just setting out on a walk with my dog when I saw him,” he told a reporter. “I recognized him straight away because of his white tail feathers.”
Humans could become better at switching between tasks – such as shifting from emailing to taking a phone call – if they behaved more like pigeons and stopped thinking about what they are doing, research by psychologists at the University of Exeter suggests.
Humans could be more efficient if they learnt from pigeons and stopped thinking about what they are doing, according to scientists.
A lonely woman who ignored a council order to stop feeding the pigeons in her garden must pay a £640 fine and £1,729 court costs.