Bird seller lynched, RAF deployed at Maniktala

A 26-year-old bird trader, Rana Das, was allegedly lynched on Wednesday in Narkeldanga over allegations of stealing pigeons. Four persons were arrested. Das and his cousin, Somnath Mali, were accosted by 15-16 people between 6am and 7am. The mob alleged that Das, who sold exotic and common birds, had no licence for the business and demanded Rs 15,000. They also claimed that Das had stolen pigeons from them. “Soon, the argument turned violent. The mob tied up Das and Mali, and thrashed them with rods and sticks. They then dragged the duo – both residents of the Narkeldanga slum – towards Gurudas Halt railway station,” claimed a local, Kartik Mali. Das was declared dead on Thursday morning, but his cousin remains in a critical condition at NRS Hospital. Recommended By Colombia The incident sparked tension in Narkeldanga early on Thursday. The agitation soon spread to neighbouring Manicktala after locals from Basakbagan blocked the Maniktala Main Road-Narkeldanga North Road crossing between 11.40am and 12.35pm, demanding the arrest of all those involved in the incident. As the area was shut for traffic, RAF officials were kept on standby, in case the situation got violent. However, the local police managed to bring the situation under control. Asesh Biswas from GRP (Sealdah) told TOI, “We have arrested four persons – Chinu, Rakesh, Amit and David – in this regard. A murder case has been initiated and search is on for the others.” Police said an initial probe has revealed that the four suspects were friends of Das. “All of them sold birds illegally. David also worked at a hotel in Topsia. The accused have previous cases of rioting and causing hurt registered against them,” another officer said.

 

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)

Documentary shows farm crime is no joke

Herds of rustled cattle, millions of stolen bees and a flock of pinched pigeons are only a handful of farm crimes that film producer Geoff Morrison displays in his new documentary series.

The series, titled Farm Crime, tells the stories of farmers across the country who have been victims of crime. The documentary sets a serious tone, underscoring how crime negatively affects a farmer’s well-being and their livelihood.

“I think when I started reading up on these stories, the first thing that surprised me was that there is a large market value for these products,” said Morrison of Big Cedar Films.

“When I think of that one theft involving maple syrup in Quebec, it was enormous in scale, something like $18 million. People were laughing at it, but it was actually serious. It’s incredible someone could pull that off.”

Morrison partnered with CBC to air the series online, releasing a set of six 15-minute episodes each week. They include cases of stolen cattle, blueberries, bees, pigeons and oysters. As well, he profiles a farm that saw a thief butcher stolen animals on site.

Like the maple syrup theft, he said these cases were hardly taken seriously. Mainstream news organizations weren’t reporting on them and, if they did, they were treated like a joke.

“It was clear to me that coverage from big or national publications was light,” he said. “It was somehow hilarious that all these bees were stolen. The local papers did take it a lot more seriously.”

When selecting farmers to profile, he said he wanted people who were comfortable sharing their stories. As well, out of the six provinces he visited, he profiled one farmer per province to showcase agriculture’s diversity.

“At the end of the day, they are good human stories of people willing to share what they’ve gone through,” he said.

The case involving oyster thefts in Prince Edward Island sticks with him the most. Morrison said the oysterman was robbed while tending to his sick wife in hospital. With the help of others, they managed to catch the thief, who was later prosecuted.

“That’s a standout case,” he said. “They handled it well, even with the terrible circumstances they were facing.”

For many of the farmers he profiled, he said crime has had long-lasting effects on them. Some change the way they do business and they feel less secure.

In the case involving stolen pigeons, Morrison said the farmer has lost his sense of security and isn’t entirely comfortable with people on his property.

“That moment of having his pigeons stolen still comes back to him,” he said. “It’s not unique for any victim of crime to feel that way.”

Morrison said he hopes the series makes people, especially those living in cities, more aware of farming and how crime can severely affect farmers.

“I hope they get a greater appreciation for the hard work that goes into growing food and agriculture products,” he said. “These crimes need to be taken seriously and we need to respect those victims, like any victim of crime.”

 

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)

In a flap: pigeons use wings to sound the alarm

Australian readers – and enthusiastic bird-watchers who have visited Australia – may well be familiar with the crested pigeon (Ocyphaps lophotes), an attractive little bird common across the southern half of the continent.

There are two things distinctive about the species. The first, not surprisingly, is the prominent crest on its head. The second is the loud, high-pitched, repetitive whistling sound it makes when it flies.

Ornithologists have long been perplexed about the origin of the noise, which is audible from a considerable distance away, because it is does not emanate from the bird’s beak.

Now however, a trio of researchers from the Australian National University in Canberra have solved the mystery. The noise is produced by a highly modified wing feather.

In a paper published in the journal Current Biology, Trevor Murray, Jochen Zeil and Robert Magrath reveal that the crested pigeon has a very unusual eighth primary wing feather which produces high note when the bird starts to fly.

The researchers acknowledge that noise-making feathers are not uncommon among the world’s bird species, and some research estimates they evolved independently more that 70 times.

However, Murray and his colleagues are the first team to demonstrate that the adaptation, in crested pigeons at least, is specifically a means of non-verbal communication.

The pigeons use the noise produced by the modified feather as an alarm signal, warning other birds of the presence of predators. The sound changes in accordance with wing beat frequency, increasing in pitch as the flight urgency develops.

To make their finding, the team recorded the sound made by the oscillating eighth primary feather – a tone at 2.9 kilohertz – and played it back to birds in conditions where no other possible danger cues were present. When the sound was made, the crested pigeons all took flight.

A control experiment using noises produced by the seventh and ninth flight feathers did not produce the same results.

Murray and his colleagues note that non-verbal noise by birds was mentioned by Charles Darwin in his book on sexual selection. He called it “instrumental music” but made no suggestion about its possible purpose.

“Our results therefore indicate, nearly 150 years after Darwin’s book,” they write, “that modified feathers can be used for non-vocal communication, and they reveal an intrinsically reliable alarm signal.”

 

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)

Because it’s Friday: a pigeon in a mask

If you’d looked to the skies in Oxford, UK, during the summer of 2016 you could have been forgiven for thinking you had spotted the world’s first bionic pigeons.

The birds in question would have been members of a very special cohort trained to wear custom-designed head sensors to track how they navigated using eye movements. The results are now revealed in a study published in the Journal of Experimental Biology.

Because pigeons’ eyes are fixed, they monitor their surroundings mainly by moving their head, according to lead researcher Fumihiro Kano from Kyoto University in Japan. Indeed, 90% of pigeon gazes are accompanied by head movements.

This means that head movement can be used as a proxy for where they are looking, and hence provide clues to their behaviour.

“Eyes are the window to the mind,” Kano says, explaining that gaze tells us a lot about how animals behave and think about the world.

For many years, he has been studying emotion and cognition in great apes (including bonobos, chimpanzees, orangutans and gorillas), Japanese monkeys, human infants, children and adults.

In 2016, he and colleagues published a study showing that apes understand when beliefs are false.

For his latest project, he thought it would be interesting to record gaze in free-moving animals, teaming up with primate biologist Dora Biro from the University of Oxford, UK, to do so.

Homing pigeons (Columba liviai) were ideal species to test in motion because they tolerate wearing custom-made masks and sensors on their head and fly back to the home loft so the data can be retrieved.

It took Kano three months to develop the special mask. Every day he rummaged through a local craft store, experimenting with different materials to create something that fitted to the pigeon’s head as stably and comfortably as possible.

The result was a device hand-made with cloths, wires and elastic bands, which he stitched and soldered together himself.

“The most important thing was to design the mask so that it did not interfere with the bird’s breathing when flying,” he explains.

The pigeons were habituated to the head units, which were continually modified until they were comfortable and the researchers were satisfied the birds could walk, take off, and fly normally while wearing them.

The masks bore an inertial measurement unit to track the bird’s head movements using a gyroscope, accelerometer and magnetometer. The pigeons also wore tiny backpacks containing a state-of-the-art GPS tracker, microcomputer and battery.

Altogether, 22 birds were released from a novel site for 172 solo flights, followed by 172 paired flights and 44 repeated solo flights.

The team was delighted with the outcome. Kano says the birds’ heads were extremely stable during the flights, and the data showed every detail of their movements as well as the GPS recording of the return path.

During solo flights, the pigeons undertook detailed scanning of the landscape, moving their heads “far more than necessary for manoeuvring flight,” says Kano.

When they approached landmarks such as a main road and railway line – linear structures that pigeons tend to use for constructing routes – they reduced their head movements, suggesting “that they indeed ‘see’ them to navigate.”

When they were flown in pairs, they reduced their head movements, “indicating that the flock-mate is a key visual cue that they need to pay attention to,” Kano says.

He suggests the method could be applied to understanding how pigeons use attention in the natural environment, and even to develop bio-inspired drones. Next, the team is keen to add a tiny camera into the sensor to get a bird’s eye vista of the world.

 

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)

Youth lynched in Kolkata for stealing pigeons

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.

Contact Info: 1- 877– 4– NO-BIRD (www.pigeonpatrol.ca)