by johnnymarin | Feb 10, 2018 | Pigeon Patrol's Services
The parents of Amarillo hobbyist Charles Hanna’s winning Hessian Pouter pigeons originated in Germany, but the birds bred in Amarillo are now national breed champions.
Hannah’s pigeons are among 4,589 being shown through Saturday at the National Pigeon Association Grand National championships at the Amarillo Civic Center Complex. The show is free and open to the public.
“I bought the parents from Germany and raised these here,” Hannah said of his blue Hessian Pouter that won the top cock award and hen that won in its category. “They’re about a year old.
“My blue pouter won the breed because it had better features and color and fuller feathers.”
Pigeon enthusiasts from the United States, Europe, Canada and Mexico are in Amarillo for the NPA’s annual national show and seem pleased with the accommodations of the first-time host city.
“This is wonderful,” said Rick Barker of Temecula, Calif. “I’ve been to 40 national conventions and the facilities are beautiful. This is our first time in Amarillo and it’s one of the best facilities ever.”
While the NPA show boosts the local economy, it wasn’t just the facilities and Embassy Suites hotel across Buchanan Street that impressed Barker.
“I can’t believe how friendly the people of Amarillo are,” he said. “We asked for directions to a restaurant and the lady said, ‘Come on, it’s close, I’ll take you,’ and she walked us there.”
Larry Warnecke of Highland, Ill., who is in the city with his American King pigeons, echoed Barker in praise for Amarillo.
“The facilities have lots of room and the hotel just across the street is fantastic,” Warnecke said.
Barker said the attraction to raising pigeons often has its roots in raising chickens.
“Many of us grew up with chickens and moved to the city,” Barker said. “For city people, this is as close farming as a city person can get. It (also) gets the kids off their phones texting.”
One of those teens at the show, Vincent Pizzuto, 14, of Prescott, Ariz., has been involved in raising pigeons since age 3.
“I’m not showing here, but friends brought me,” Pizzuto said. “I love a lot of things about raising pigeons — the colors, you meet a lot of people, the competition, the awards.”
The participants come from all walks of life.
“We have doctors, dentists, attorney and all kinds of people showing,” he said. “This is a show, but racing pigeons have million dollar championships and you can make more money racing pigeons that racing horses, and I’ve done both.”
The showing of champions will be the show’s feature at 1 p.m. Saturday.
The top pouter — known for their blowing of their bills that makes them look like they are “pouting” — of 30 breeds will be in Saturday’s final lineup, and Hannah hopes his birds among the finalists.
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 johnnymarin | Feb 9, 2018 | Animal Deterrent Products
Maintenance work will cause disruption for bus station users.
Wrexham Council is undertaking improvements at the town’s bus station in King Street over the weekend.
Workers will be putting up some netting to prevent the pigeons from causing a mess and also installing new LED lights in the near future.
All buses will run as normal and access from Lord Street to the retail arcade during opening hours will be unaffected.
People using the station between 6pm on Saturday and 6am on Monday will be affected.
Anyone waiting for a bus will have to wait outside the concourse which will be closed for the works to take place.
A Wrexham Council spokesman said: “We’re sorry if this causes inconvenience but this work has to be carried out before the end of the financial year.
Cllr David A Bithell, lead member for the environment and transport, said: “We do have a scheduled improvement programme for the bus station that will take place over the coming months and this is the first phase which will see improved lighting and an end to the problems caused by pigeons in the roofspace.”
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 johnnymarin | Feb 8, 2018 | Pigeon Patrol's Services
A voluntary ambulance service for pigeons has taken off in Aberdeen.
Kevin Newell and Flo Blackbourn run Wiggy and Friends Animal Rescue and go to the aid of injured pigeons across the city.
They are appealing for help to map colonies so the pigeon patrol can target the most appropriate areas.
The couple – who describe themselves as rapid responders – take the injured pigeons home for rehabilitation before setting them free.
Mr Newell told BBC Scotland that many pigeons get trapped because of netting on buildings aimed at deterring them.
He told BBC Scotland: “These pigeons have no-one to help them.
“We want to bring awareness that pigeons are dying horrible deaths.”
Flying into windows and being hit by cars are other causes of pigeon injury.
Ms Blackbourn explained: “A couple of years ago Kevin brought home a pigeon that he found lying on its back.
“We posted about it, we just thought we’d take him in as everyone else was stepping over him and didn’t really care.
“Ever since then people kind of knew us as the people to bring pigeons to.”
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 johnnymarin | Feb 7, 2018 | Pigeon Spikes
Every day, at sun rise, A. Prasanna heads to the terrace to feed a flock of pigeons. He scatters millets from a bowl, held in his left hand. “Every week, I spend nearly 50 kilos of millets for feeding the pigeons.” Prasanna, a resident of Sathasivam Nagar in Madipakkam, says, “Every day, around 6.30 a.m., I feed the pigeons. If I am unwell or out of station, my wife and son and daughter — A. P. Priyadarshini, P. Anirudh and P. Harini — feed the pigeons.” On an average, more than 200 pigeons gather every day at our terrace. He began feeding the pigeons two years ago. Besides pigeons, a good number of squirrels have also started visiting Prasanna’s terrace.
“I started this practice after I watched a video that was circulated on WhatApp. It showed a resident of Royapettah feeding parakeets on his terrace every day,” he says, adding, “ I also feed cows and stray dogs with bananas, sesbania grandiflora (Agathi Keerai) and biscuits and help poor people by buying them food.”
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 johnnymarin | Feb 6, 2018 | Pigeons in the News
John Wilson Foster’s Pilgrims of the Air starts in the realm of magical realism and ends in horror. From miles of passenger pigeons blocking out the sun, to vast massacres of the bird and deforestation by humans, to a solitary last bird dying in the Cincinnati Zoo in 1914, the story is all too easy to allegorize.
Allegories have long surrounded the passenger pigeon, so astonishing to many of its witnesses that only figures of speech could convey their wonder. They were called clouds — or, more threateningly, tempests, streams or floods, troops and regiments — and compared to the “coils of a gigantic serpent,” in John James Audubon’s recounting. Attempts at literal depictions conveyed the flocks’ grand scale — ornithologist Alexander Wilson estimated 240 miles and more than two billion pigeons in one grouping — but lacked the splendor of figurative language.
The comparisons at times suggested an uncertainty about the birds — were they good or evil? Early European explorers in the New World saw a prelapsarian Eden, yet, Foster writes, nature’s “abundance was her abandon” in the Puritan Protestant response. The passenger pigeons, again serving as symbols, were either augurs of disaster or signs of God’s pleasure, presaging sickness (because they stayed longer during mild weather) or promising bounty. Either way, they were chaotic, not orderly — and “this new world cried out for order, discipline and overmastery through agriculture,” Foster writes. “The New World was to be a spiritual and material enterprise: colonisation obliged conversion. Native abundance, at first marvelled at, was to be harnessed and pruned; Nature was to be appropriated, exploited and marketed.”
Our knowledge of what happened to the species does not diminish the magnitude of its tragedy. The vastness of the passenger pigeon flocks shifts, horrifyingly, to the scope of their massacre, a “slaughter of the innocents, as one market gunner admitted.” The birds had long been consumed — the Potawatomi people, for instance, were among its hunters — but in the mid-19th century, harvests turned into “carnivalesque org[ies] of destruction,” and eventually the killings were “dispassionate, organised, ruthless and of an industrial scale.” Pigeoners, aided increasingly by the expansion of the railroad and information networks that let them know where to go, descended on nesting sites and mass-executed the birds using sledgehammers, fire, clubs, and guns. No destructive force seemed taboo. “As many birds as possible were killed or captured, irrespective of demand or need,” Foster writes. Milliners and taxidermists were among the beneficiaries of the killings.
Foster, a literary critic, presents this American tragedy as one of anthropocentric ego. He writes acutely and, perhaps appropriately for the subject, often in dense columns of winding prose. Even as he cites historical facts and ornithological details, there is an underlying poetry to his descriptions; the story he is telling is, ultimately, a eulogy. Most hauntingly, a subtextual question pervades Pilgrims of the Air: As temperatures rise, which species must we eulogize next?
One of the book’s most powerful poetic devices is the metaphor in its title. The birds were pilgrims and explorers; Foster writes that Ectopistes migratorius, the passenger pigeon’s scientific name, translates to “wandering wanderer.” Passenger pigeons “might embody American wilderness in which they exercised the unfenced freedom of nomads or rootless pioneers,” Foster writes, although “their nesting sites were nevertheless called cities.” As industry and pigeoners encroached, “the pilgrims of the forest became fugitives,” and within mere decades, the wandering, and the wonder, were over.
As Anne Schmauss discussed in The Santa FeNew Mexican earlier this week, 2018 has been named the Year of the Bird by the National Audubon Society, National Geographic, and other institutions. This year marks the centennial of the protective Migratory Bird Treaty Act, which arrived too late for the passenger pigeon but did save the snowy egret and other species. “The Year of the Bird might be just the wake-up call we all need to protect our birds and ourselves from the mounting threats against our world,” Schmauss writes.
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)
