Bald eagles aren’t just an iconic national symbol south of the border — here in Toronto, they’re the noble and brave protectors of garbage dumps.
Local landfills are plagued by garbage-eating seagulls. They harm themselves by eating unnatural food sources and can harm the environment by carrying trash outside the landfill.
The city’s eco-friendly solution to that problem? Massive birds of prey that swoop in and scare the seagulls away.
“We train these raptors to chase the gulls away,” said Stephen Bucciarelli, president of Predator Bird Services Inc. “It’s essentially their job to do it. But to them it’s not going to work, they just have fun all day flying around.”
This one-year-old bald eagle is just one of the predatory birds that scares seagulls away from Toronto landfills. It’s still young and will grow to have a white feathered head as it becomes mature.
Falconry is a practice that dates back thousands of years. The predatory birds, including hawks and falcons, were trained to catch prey as food for humans before guns became a common tool in hunting.
Within the last 40 years, companies like Bucciarelli’s have used falconry as a form of bird control.
“We’ve learned how to manage these birds so they are really comfortable at work and effective at it,” he said.
A one-year-old bald eagle is one of the predators that soars across Toronto landfills.
Stephen Bucciarelli is president of Predator Bird Services Inc. The company trains birds of prey to scare away other, smaller birds.
“He’s just learning the ropes of flying in the wind and he’s doing really well,” Bucciarelli said, adding that the eagle and its winged colleagues are so effective at their job that gulls don’t even frequent the landfills anymore — they’ve learned to stay far away.
It’s a win-win because the seagulls don’t know what’s good for them, he said.
“It’s not good for birds to eat unnatural food sources, so if we’re scaring them…they’re going to be eating from natural sources like fish rather than things leftover from humans,” Bucciarelli said.
Seagulls that are harming the environment and themselves by eating unnatural food sources at landfills better watch out. This bald eagle is serious about protecting city territory.
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 least one of Toronto’s new supposedly raccoon-proof green bins has been chewed up a week after it was wheeled out in Scarborough.
Brad Gates of Gates Wildlife tells Moore in the Morning it looks to him that this is the work of either a squirrel or a rat.
The bite marks on the bin’s plastic lid tell the tale.
The city’s response to the chewed up bin? Try a home remedy: sprinkle a bit of hot sauce on the lid.
“It is not indestructible,” Jim McKay, general manager of solid waste services, says of the new bin.
He says the unique part of the new bin is the locking lid. The rest of it is pretty standard.
McKay says the plastic is basically the same material and thickness as the old bins, which also had squirrel problems.
He does not sound too concerned, adding that only 0.5 per cent of the old bins would have to be replaced each year due to animal damage.
Gates adds there will be pockets of Toronto more overrun by squirrels where the new green bins will be “rendered useless”.
But Gates says there is not much that can guarantee rodents stay out.
“We see raccoons and squirrels chew through metal all the time in our business,” he warns. “As long as they can get an edge to start to open up a hole, they will begin to chew on it.”
Mayor John Tory, who has been a part of two staged photo ops in the last year to show off the new bins joked about the breach on twitter.
Speaking on the Moore in the Morning roundtable councillor Shelley Carroll says city staff has some explaining to do.
“We guaranteed to people that you gotta do the change-out, the locking mechanism will keep out the raccoons. How did they not know about this?”
The city is paying a California firm $31-million for a 10-year contract to replace and maintain Toronto’s 500,000 green bins.
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.
ACTION is being taken to curb the amount of pigeon mess being left outside a Halstead shop.
The former Lalezar building, in High Street, has become a mecca for pigeons which sit on the various ledges at the front of the shop.
However, this has led to the building and the pavement below it becoming covered in their mess.
Gordon Birchell, of Birchell Steel Consultant Surveyors, which is marketing the empty building for let, said: “They are doing what pigeons do.
“We have put up the scaffolding to do something about it.
“The pigeons are everywhere in Halstead and they are an awful problem.”
Complaints about the mess outside the building were first made in November, with Braintree Council’s Street Scene Team promising to clean up the pavement.
He added that he was in negotiations with a company interested in moving into the ground floor, but declined to say what the company was.
“It isn’t a restaurant, but it is catering related,” he said.
Charity shop St Helena Hospice, opposite the restaurant, was due to move into the building this year, but pulled out after deciding the costs involved were too high.
The building, formerly a post office, was built in November 1895 and has changed hands many times in recent years.
Lalezar opened in May 2014 before closing at the start of 2015 following a gas leak and the building has been vacant ever since.
Mr Birchell said he was confident the former Thomas Cook shop, further down High Street, would also soon be occupied.
The shop had been empty for two years before being bought at auction by a London-based investor for £150,000.
The investor had planned to use the building himself, but is now planning to rent it out, according to Mr Birchell.
He said that it was “just about under offer”.
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.
HUNTSVILLE – Spikes and trapping have failed, so it’s time for round three.
The Huntsville general committee voted in favour on May 25 of purchasing a net with an estimated cost of between $10,000 and $14,000 in order to keep pigeons out of the entrance to the Canada Summit Centre. This is the third time this issue has come before councillors since December of last year and all previous methods to keep pigeons out of the area have failed.
The last time the pigeon problem was raised council approved an $850-a-month plan to trap and relocate the birds. That plan was never implemented due to the contractor wanting to operate the relocation program for longer than council was willing to fund it.
Brian Crozier, town property manager, said at this point removing nests has only led to the pigeons becoming more entrenched in the building.
“I would really like to never come back and speak at this table about this issue again. Anything we can do from a permanent stand point would be great.”
– Brian Crozier
“The dormers seem to have been the staging area and as we’ve been pushing them, they’ve been moving further and further back into the building and finding other nesting areas on the site as well. We’ve been finding nests on the roof, in the gutters. We’ve actually pushed pigeons to the back of the building. The process we’ve started has just started,” said Crozier.
Councillors favoured the net option, as they believed trapping the birds could just lead to endless expense on the matter with no real end. Crozier pointed out the net would likely mean the birds would move to other locations in town, like the front of the Active Living Centre.
The Town of Bracebridge reportedly successfully dealt with their pigeon problem after a pigeon relocation program that trapped 400 to 500 birds in a year.
One of the town’s earlier attempts to keep the birds out was to spend around $10,000 to install spikes along the lights and surfaces in the entranceway. That proved ineffective as, according to staff, the pigeons would just push them aside.
Councillor Bob Stone repeated his criticism that the town had not been properly maintaining the spikes installed in the area.
Huntsville mayor Scott Aitchison said he hopes the net will solve the pigeon problem once and for all.
“We’ve spent, it looks like, $5,000 this year and $5,000 next year for the pigeon relocation program. Why don’t we finally spend $10,000 to $15,000 and put the nets up so we never have to spend it again,” said Aitchison.
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.
Bald eagles aren’t just an iconic national symbol south of the border — here in Toronto, they’re the noble and brave protectors of garbage dumps.
Don’t blame the raccoons for this one.
ACTION is being taken to curb the amount of pigeon mess being left outside a Halstead shop.
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.”