by johnnymarin | Feb 1, 2018 | Pigeon Patrol's Services
When pigeons see Avro the peregrine falcon, they flee.
It’s a smart move: not only are peregrine falcons the fastest animal on earth, capable of reaching speeds of 390 km per hour in a dive, but pigeons are a staple food source for peregrines in downtown Vancouver.
That’s the kind of predator-prey relationship TransLink hopes to tap into to keep SkyTrain stations free of pigeons, which caused 142 train delays in 2017.
As part of a new six-week Translink pilot project Avro has been riding the SkyTrain everyday with his handler, Kim Kamstra, scaring pigeons away from the tracks and stations by simply looking at them.
On any given morning in December, Kamstra says there would be more than 70 pigeons at 22nd Station in New Westminster. Three weeks into the pilot project, there are none.
“Instinctually it’s a predator-prey relationship,” he said.
“But it’s humane because [Avro] is tethered to my fist. He’s not flying off to kill any animals. The smart pigeons exit really quickly.”
It’s the first method that has worked, according to Vivienne King, president of SkyTrain.
“We’ve tried nets, we’ve tried spikes, we’ve even tried mimicking the sounds of the falcons … and the pigeons keep coming back.”
But so far, the fear of a real falcon has kept them away, said Kamstra.
The pair start their day at 22nd station, then ride the train to VCC-Clark, Burrard, Renfrew, Rupert, and Holdom. At each stop, Kamstra walks around the station with Avro perched on his fist.
“We start travelling to each station randomly because that’s very upsetting to the pigeons, knowing this predator shows up randomly,” he said.
But the pigeons will eventually realize Avro is not actively hunting any of them, said Kamstra.
“Surprise,” he said. “I’ll change birds.”
Kamstra co-owns Raptors Ridge Birds of Prey Inc. and has 20 working birds in his roost. He brought another falcon to various SkyTrain stations on Tuesday to keep the pigeons “on their toes,” he explained.
He says he has more than enough raptors and handlers to patrol the entire SkyTrain network, but it will be up to TransLink whether to expand or even continuing funding the program.
Three visits to each station every day for six weeks is costing Translink $18,000, according to King.
When the project ends on January 28, staff will then analyze the resulting data and bring it to the board, who will decide whether the project is worth continuing.
But no matter what the decision is, there is one thing both animal welfare advocates and SkyTrain are asking people to do – stop feeding the pigeons.
“The problem is we deal with all of this, the pigeons move on, and then people feed the birds,” said King.
A sign at Burrard Station warns people that feeding birds is against the law. Not only does it attract pigeons back to the site, but it is also bad for pigeons’ health, and the health of bigger animals that eat pigeons, said Kamstra.
“Please, please, don’t feed the birds,” said King.
“We’re trying to make the system a little safer for everyone.”
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 | Jan 31, 2018 | Pigeons in the News
The Alexandria City Attorney’s Office has filed criminal charges against Bio Corporation, whose workers were shown drowning fully conscious pigeons and injecting live crayfish with chemicals in a PETA video exposé of the classroom dissection supplier.
Based on PETA’s evidence and following an investigation by Alexandria police, Bio Corporation has been charged with 25 counts of cruelty to animals under a Minnesota statute that makes it a crime to “willfully instigate or in any way further any act of cruelty to any animal or animals.” The first hearing in the case is scheduled for January 31 at the Douglas County Courthouse
“These criminal charges send a strong message to the cruel, secretive animal-dissection industry that it’s not above the law,” says PETA Senior Vice President of Cruelty Investigations Daphna Nachminovitch. “The only sure way for caring educators and students to guarantee that they’re not supporting cruelty is by opting for superior virtual-dissection methods.”
PETA’s exposé also showed workers discussing how frozen turtles shipped to the facility sometimes came “back to life” and were refrozen. Workers without respirators injected dead animals with buffered formaldehyde, a known human carcinogen, and faulty formaldehyde lines sprayed them in the face. In response, PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to experiment on”—filed complaints with the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Minnesota Occupational Safety and Health Administration.
TeachKind, PETA’s humane education division, has sent letters urging the dozens of school districts nationwide that have purchased dead animals from Bio Corporation to eliminate dissection from their schools. PETA offers free dissection software through its educational grants program. Non-animal educational tools have been shown to teach anatomy as well as—and, in many cases, better than—dissection.
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 | Jan 30, 2018 | Bird Netting
Every day, come rain, come shine, come London fog, three pigeons start their mooing-cooing morning song on the fire escape outside my bedroom window. I used to hate it, this dawn sing-along. Doves on a balcony have romance; Bayswater pigeons none. But I’ve grown fond of them: my private dawn chorus up in the chimneystacks. They start before it’s light, following the seasons, earlier and earlier towards high summer. (By June, when they’re at it before 4am, I do, I admit, fantasise about a cap gun.)
My grubby pigeons may not have been quite what King’s College researchers had in mind when they published a study showing how even a short burst of birdsong – or a glimpse of blue sky, or lunch under a tree – improves mood and mental well-being among city dwellers. Perhaps something more picturesque: a jay, a chaffinch, a chatter of Cockney sparrows.
We’re supposed to deplore monk parakeets, exotic invaders of our city parks, but I love their tropical call. You hear them before you see their flash of emerald feathers – and for a moment you might be on the Equator.
I’m partial to the grumble of Tube trains beneath the stalls in West End theatres…also, the clank-and-smash of recycling paladins tipped into lorries, wine bottles breaking as they go
If the pigeons get me up, the bells of St James’s Paddington mark my hours. Six chimes for breakfast, seven for a walk, twelve for lunch, five for pens down and saucepans out. On Sundays, when they ring long and loudly for High Mass at ten, I get a guilty feeling if I’m still in my dressing gown. Church bells are a comfort, too, to the insomniac. Companionable to lie there counting the small hours together.
In the list of city noise complaints – horns, car alarms, drills, revving engines, and the bleating of ‘This Vehicle is Reversing’ – you rarely hear anyone say: “I wish that church would put a sock in it”. John Betjeman captured the shyly welcoming tone in Summoned By Bellswhen he wrote of the ‘bearded rector’ of St Ervan’s ‘holding in one hand/ A gong-stick, in the other hand a book,/ Struck, while he read, a heavy-sounding bell,/ Hung from an elm bough by the churchyard gate./ “Better come in. It’s time for Evensong.”’
Do others feel mournful at the news that the twelve bells of St Paul’s northwest tower have fallen silent for the first time since the Second World War? They will be taken away for restoration and won’t peal again until November. No bongs from Big Ben, hushed bells at St Paul’s. The capital is strangely muffled.
Birds and bells are crowd-pleasers, but there are other, more niche noises that make up a city. I’m partial to the grumble of Tube trains beneath the stalls in West End theatres. There you are on the battlements of Elsinore, Hamlet’s father’s ghost flapping his bed-sheets… and a Piccadilly Line train thunders underfoot. Also, the clank-and-smash of recycling paladins tipped into lorries, wine bottles breaking as they go. If silence is golden, then familiar, reassuring sounds are a silver second-best.
I’m in Paris this week, in a borrowed flat above a school playground. At playtime, games, laughter, shouts echo up the lightwell. When the lesson bell rings, I think, with a lurch of stomach: ‘Double maths.’ It’s wonderful to realise each time that the bells aren’t summoning me.
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 | Jan 29, 2018 | Pigeon Patrol's Services
A company that provides dead animals for study and dissection is facing 25 charges of animal cruelty due to the way they allegedly killed the animals. If found guilty, the owners could face up to $25,000 in fines and/or up to six years in jail.
As Newsweek reported in November, the biological supply company Bio Corporation was the subject of hidden video and an investigation into their practices. The video, shown above, was secretly recorded by an undercover representative from People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, or PETA. The footage showed workers at the company’s Alexandria, Minnesota, facility apparently drowning fully-conscious pigeons, injecting live crayfish with latex and claiming that they sometimes would freeze turtles to death. The complaint, The State of Minnesota vs. Bio Company BDA Bio Corporation, claims that these methods are inhumane and illegal.
The company says that most of the animals they acquire are brought to them already dead. But according to the undercover video, the company was obtaining some live animals and killing them at the facility in ways that the US Department of Agriculture consider illegal.
In a statement sent to Newsweek, Bill Wadd, co-owner of Bio-Corporation, said, “We understand that we were the subject of an undercover sting-type investigation,” he wrote. “Unfortunately, the animals observed in that investigation, including the pigeons and the crayfish, put our operation in a bad light.”
PETA took the video to the local police department, and then to a district judge, who insisted that the Alexandria police investigate. Newsweek published the footage on November 21, 2017, and the following day the Alexandria Police Department sent a detective to interview the owners of Bio Corporation and investigate the facility. The Alexandria Police Department did not immediately respond to an interview request for this article.
Officials reviewed the complaint, the affidavit from the undercover witness of the alleged abuse, the video and testimony from the detective who visited the facility. On December 29, 2017, they filed 25 misdemeanor charges of animal cruelty, specifically regarding treatment of the crayfish and pigeons, against the company.
Wadd said the company obtains pigeons ethically and euthanizes them humanely. Situated in an agricultural area, Bio Corporation collects pigeons from people who legally kill or capture them in order to protect their avian livestock, like turkeys, chickens, ducks and geese from diseases that pigeons can spread. The pigeons are usually dead when they get there, but sometimes the workers kill them, according to Wadd.
“We have a policy to euthanize these birds with gas but actually water submersion is a better and arguably more humane method because of the short time necessary to complete the process,” Wadd wrote.
Wadd said that the birds die after only 10 to 20 seconds. But drowning is not considered an acceptable form of euthanasia, according to the American Veterinary Medical Association (AVMA), because it causes unnesseary suffering. The AVMA has standards of humane euthanasia that legally must be followed by certain USDA-certified companies such as Bio Corporation.
“That said, we are using the gas now because of the complaint,” Wadd added. He also wrote that they intend to order only dead crayfish from now on.
Representatives for the company are due in court on January 31, 2018. They continue to sell pigeons online for between $9.85 and $12.15 each.
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 | Jan 28, 2018 | Pigeon Patrol's Services
Wattle seeds, along with those of gorse and broom, are popular with bronzewing pigeons, which will often be seen on the ground underneath these plants in late summer.
Pigeons are able to break down the extremely hard outer shell of the seeds to make use of the nutrients inside.
Currawongs, on the other hand, regurgitate wattle seeds and other indigestible matter in the form of pellets.
The pigeons have a digestive system that uses small stones in the gizzard to grind the seeds.
These perform a similar function to teeth.
A currawong’s digestive system is not able to crush such seeds.
As far as wattle seeds are concerned, the currawongs seem to eat only blackwoods, which apparently contain some nutrient in the red outer “funicle” surrounding the hard black seed that the birds seek out.
The blackwood seeds are thus spread by currawongs, but not by pigeons.
Most wattles, like the blackwood, form their seeds three or four months after spring flowering, but there are a few that take twelve months.
The wirilda and the lightwood are two others producing mature seeds twelve months after flowering.
These three wattle species produce their flowers later in the season than most others.
The bronzewings will feed underneath the wattles, gorse and broom for several months.
Because of their hard casing, wattle seeds can be viable for 20 years or more after falling.
LEADEN FLYCATCHER
A scarce and irregular small bird visitor to the Ballarat region is the leaden flycatcher, named for the lead-grey colour of the male.
A pair nesting at Brown Hill have attracted a lot of interest.
In appearance both the male and the female leaden flycatcher are very similar to the male and female satin flycatchers. At Brown Hill the two species are living close together, so the differences between the two can be more clearly appreciated.
The status of the leaden flycatcher in the Ballarat region is not clear.
It has visited and nested a few times, but perhaps it is a regular but un-noticed visitor here in small numbers, missed because of its similarity to the more common satin flycatcher.
The habitats of the two are usually different, with the leaden flycatcher preferring drier sites than the gully-loving satin.
Fortunately, the Brown Hill birds are nesting at about 10 metres high, and are relatively unperturbed by the photographers and observers.
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)
