Avid young pigeon enthusiast Abigail Mona Redelinghuys (12) is a gr 6 pupil at Southcity Christian School. Her interest in pigeon racing was sparked by stepdad Hannes Nortjé when she was eight years old. After curiously studying Hannes’s interaction with his birds in his loft in 2015, she was given a pair of breeding pigeons by Frikkie Muller while on holiday in Western Cape.
This chain of events soon turned a hobby into a lifestyle. Abigail is currently the youngest member of the NPS Racing Pigeon Club on Lower South Coast. After racing pigeons competitively for almost two consecutive years, Abigail and her ‘blue bar pigeon’ (ring number NPS 2107) took first place at the recent KZN Combined Racing event.
Chairman of the NPS Racing Pigeon Club Deon Kapp visited Abigail Redelinghuys at the loft in Ramsgate to congratulate her on behalf of the club.
This is a phenomenal achievement as the bird had to travel 1 588m per minute (95 28km/h) over a distance of 557km from Boshoff, Free State, to Ramsgate against 1 197 other birds.
Abigail attributes her success to her passion for her pigeons and the support she receives from her family. The club looks forward to watching this young, enthusiastic member’s future progress.
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.
LAS VEGAS (KTNV) – A serious pigeon problem is popping up in at least one Las Vegas neighborhood forcing a family to declare an all-out war.
Sandy Love said the problem began a few years ago but now the pigeon population has ballooned in her neighborhood near Ann Road and U.S. 95.
“Just the pigeons, it’s crazy,” said Love.
“I mean, they are out of control now,” she added.
Love and her neighbors suspect someone is feeding the flying vermin nearby causing them to roost and poop — everywhere.
“This is my pigeon stick and it’s to get rid of all of the pigeons under my solar panels,” explained Love while holding a stick made of bamboo.
Love says aside from from the pigeon poop and feathers, she’s worried about her mother Liz Watson, 84, who suffers from Lupus.
“I do not have an immune system,” explained Liz Watson.
“I have SLE lupus and I’ve had it for 30 years so I have to be super careful,” added Watson.
The Southern Nevada Health District said pigeons can pose a danger to people.
A well-fed pigeon can produce up to 25 pounds of poop every year, according to the Southern Nevada Health District.
The city of Las Vegas introduced an ordinance against feeding pigeonsearlier this month, however a formal vote to enact the ordinance may not take place until October.
A Las Vegas spokesperson said if passed, it would bring the city of Las Vegas in line with similar ordinances on the books in Clark County and Henderson.
In the meantime, Love says she has fortified her home using pigeon spikes, gorilla glue, and a decoy owl.
Authorities recommend consulting with a pest control specialist to tackle additional pigeon problems.
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 pair of falcons perched high above the Melbourne CBD skyline have gotten birdwatchers excited for an impending hatch after laying four fresh eggs – with the action all happening via webcam.
Viewers tuning into the livestream have been given renewed hope after the webcam was taken down last year after two chicks were witnessed dying after a suspected poisoning.
Watchers have been sitting nervously, keeping track of the falcons who are trying their best to incubate the eggs on top of the 33-storey 367 Collins St skyscraper.
Talking to ABC News, Birdlife Australia volunteer Dr Victor Hurley discussed why he believes the dead chicks didn’t get past the point of infancy.
Mr Hurley said they’d had trouble with adult falcons catching pigeons who had ingested bird deterrent-type chemicals which have been known to be used to eradicate feral pigeons in the city.
‘The peregrines feed almost exclusively on other birds, so they see this pigeon lame and they pick it up and it’s covered in this fairly caustic gel which the peregrines then ingest themselves,’ he said.
Birdwatchers in Melbourne are ecstatic at the news of four eggs being laid by a peregrine falcon after two of its chicks tragically dying last year after feeding off a poisoned pigeon
Peregrine Falcon
– Peregrine Falcons live in several of Australian major cities, nesting on ledges of skyscrapers.
– They feed on small and medium-sized birds, as well as rabbits and other day-active mammals.
– Peregrines swoop onto their prey at speeds of up to 300km/h, which has inherent dangers, as they occasionally collide with overhead wires, usually fatal at such speeds.
– Rather than building a nest, they lay their eggs in recesses of cliff faces, tree hollows or in the large abandoned nests of other birds. The female incubates the eggs and is fed by the male on the nest.
The tragedy was made more potent after Dr Hurley claimed he had been told by Melbourne City Council that these chemicals were illegal in the city boundaries but peregrine falcons were known to hunt up to 10kilometres from the nest.
While it is currently unclear whether the two falcons seen on webcam are the same from last year, Dr Hurley says they look remarkably similar.
‘You’ve probably got a pair surviving at a site, on average, maybe three to four years, and then one of them dies and they get replaced, or another one comes in and kills the resident and takes over,’ Dr Hurley said.
The falcons have generated so much discussion that a dedicated Facebook page has been set up, named the 367 Collins Falcon Watchers.
It’s founder, Leigh Stillard, who started the page to support the work of the Victorian Peregrine Project, believes that the more people watch the footage and post images the more awareness and knowledge on how to treat this ‘remarkable creature’ can be told.
The falcon and its eggs can be watched on a live-stream from on top of 367 Collins Street in Melbourne’s CBD
‘We hope one day we will see many more bird of prey families living in the Melbourne CBD,’ he said.
According to Dr Hurley, if the falcons continue to incubate undistracted the recently laid eggs should hatch in around 30 days.
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.
Late in the summers of my childhood, black specks would fall out of the sky, floating in through my open bedroom window, snagging on the net curtains. Though we lived a good half mile from the nearest field, the charred shreds from stubble-burning made no distinction between town and country. Sooty showers rained down on suburban sensibilities year after year. Though people complained, nothing changed, for this was an age when farming sat in the social and political ascendancy.
A quarter of a century after a nationwide ban on stubble-burning began, the cereal fields are left to simmer under a weakening sun. Many hot weeks ago, the combines came and the harvest was taken off. Gold expanses of spiky stalks were left in regimented lines with bleached debris beneath. But, even now, on warming afternoons, the dusty plenty of July wafts from the roasted aftermath of the crop. There is spilled wheat in the chaff, barley grains exuding malted odours beneath stiff-straight stems, and from every “bare” field, a toasty flavour on the nose.
And still the harvest keeps giving. Early in the morning, wood pigeons, the white-collared workers of the tractor tramlines, are gorging in conspiratorial huddles among the barley stubble, paying little attention to the bike soughing alongside on the dirt track.
Off the bridleway, a flock of greylag geese in a slow bustle, some heads up, some heads down, are paddling through the wheat sticks. Big birds, big appetites. Holding a bumpy line beside the hedge, I swivel my head to the right and count. Fifty-two, fifty-three geese. They are not plucking at straws; they are finding something to eat.
I have half an eye on the thick tussocks at the base of one hedge, where there are whipped whirlpools of grass with black holes at their core. A rat spurted out of one the other day in front of me, a blur of thrusting snout and spider-fast legs. It trailed a pale tail that appeared to have levitated to the horizontal. I find myself glancing down now, checking hole by hole, filled with a mixture of excited expectation and revulsion. Human antipathy towards this gleaner of the fields runs very deep indeed.
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.
Kolkata: A youth has been lynched in Kolkata for allegedly stealing a flock of pigeons. Police have so far arrested four accused but the rest are still at large.
The lynching took place near the railway tracks at Kankurgachi on Wednesday (5 August) morning and the youth Rana Das alias Chotka (26) was declared dead at NRS Medical College and Hospital at Seladah.
According to his elder brother Rabi Das, a gang of youths from their Narkeldanga neighbourhood accused his brother of stealing pigeons from a household in the locality. As compensation for this, they demanded Rana to pay Rs 15,000.
But with Rana expressing inability to pay such a hefty sum, the youths dragged him to a spot near the railway tracks at Kankurgachi and tied him with iron chains to a pole. They then started hitting him with iron roads.
Rana soon succumbed to the torture. Hearing about him being beaten up, family members and relatives rushed to the spot and rushed him to NRS Medical College. Doctors declared Rana brought dead.
The bereaved family then lodged an FIR at Narkeldanga police station naming 12 youths. But with police making no arrests till this morning, people of the locality blocked the Maniktala Main Road for about an hour.
The public outrage eventually made police swung into action and arrest four suspects ~ Rakesh, Amit, Chinu, and David. A manhunt is on for the remaining accused.
Police said that all the suspects are associated with crimes in and around Narkeldanga-Kankurgachi area. A few of them had been arrested in other cases in the past.
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.
When they had landed back on spoil heaps left by the old alum mines at Sandsend Ness, I focused and found that a good number of the 80 or so birds sported the diagnostic white rump and black wing bars of the rock dove (Columba livia). Their blue plumage also resembled the species as illustrated in my guidebook. However, other birds in the flock ranged in colour from reddish brown to light grey, clearly hybrids that have resulted from interbreeding with other members of the dove family. These constitute the familiar city pigeons and homing pigeons. It is possible, though, that the birds I identified as rock doves were also of diluted stock. My doubt was raised by another guidebook which said that it has become almost impossible to disentangle feral from wild birds and added: “While the former can resemble and behave like wild rock doves as far south as the Yorkshire coastal cliffs, few if any are of unalloyed native stock. Those found on the remote north-western coasts of Scotland and in the outer isles are usually considered the purest examples.” However, a study of the birds at Flamborough and Bempton found that 70 per cent of the population were “blues” resembling the wild-type, while the remainder showed clear indications of domestic ancestry. That was roughly the proportion of wild to feral birds I came across last week. And after checking the admittedly imperfect photographs I managed to take of the flock I can’t really see any difference between the “blues” there and illustrations of the classic rock dove plumage. The birds have long been known to inhabit cliffs along the coast from Saltburn-by-the-Sea down to the chalk headland of Flamborough. An old North Riding name for the bird is blue dove, and on some parts of the Yorkshire coast it also became known as the cliff pigeon. Their fondness for precipices and ledges, in fact, is probably why rock dove hybrids have adapted so well to living on buildings like Leeds Town Hall and Salts Mill. The opportunistic nature of rock doves/feral pigeons is undoubtedly the secret of their success. In towns and cities the latter continue breeding well into late summer, as do rock doves on the coast. In fact, once the breeding season for seabirds like guillemots, razorbills and kittiwakes is over at the cliffs of Bempton and Flamborough rock doves sometimes take over the ledges to rear another brood. Like woodpigeons, they were a reliable and cheap source of protein for centuries and kept in cages to provide food, while others were shot at several locations along the coast.
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.
