by johnnymarin | Dec 3, 2017 | Pigeon Patrol's Services
The Shiv Sena claimed that the structure, which was being constructed by local BJP MLA Mangalprabhat Lodha, was illegal. Upping its ante against the BJP, the Shiv Sena urged the BMC to demolish a ‘kabutarkhana’ (feeding place for pigeons) at Girgaum Chowpatty on Wednesday. “That was an illegal construction and we complained to the BMC leading to its demolition,” said a local Shiv Sena vibhag pramukh Pandurang Sakpal. He added that a new, bigger kabutarkhana was being constructed at Chowpatty Bandstand since Wednesday morning in place of the one that was in existence. When contacted, Lodha said he did not want to comment on this “sensitive issue” and added that he was unaware of the action by the BMC.
Upping its ante against the BJP, the Shiv Sena urged the BMC to demolish a ‘kabutarkhana’ (feeding place for pigeons) at Girgaum Chowpatty on Wednesday. The Shiv Sena claimed that the structure, which was being constructed by local BJP MLA Mangalprabhat Lodha, was illegal. “That was an illegal construction and we complained to the BMC leading to its demolition,” said a local Shiv Sena vibhag pramukh Pandurang Sakpal. He added that a new, bigger kabutarkhana was being constructed at Chowpatty Bandstand since Wednesday morning in place of the one that was in existence. “When it comes to Chowpatty, there is a high-power committee, CRZ rules, and no construction can be done there in an arbitrary manner,” said Sakpal, adding that Rajya Sabha MP Anil Desai, Lok Sabha MP from South Mumbai Arvind Sawant, MLA Sunil Shinde and former BEST committee Arun Dudhwadkar were present during the demolition on Wednesday evening. When contacted, Lodha said he did not want to comment on this “sensitive issue” and added that he was unaware of the action by the BMC. The BMC assistant commissioner Vishwas Mote confirmed that the BMC had demolished the kabutarkhana and added that the issue had been brought to their notice by locals, and that the action had not been taken under the influence of any political party.
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 | Dec 2, 2017 | Bird Deterrent Products
You do not have to look far to see pigeons in Downtown La Crosse. A big price tag has been put on cleaning up the messes those pigeons are leaving behind.
Last Monday night, the La Crosse Board of Public Works approved $33,000 for pigeon waste cleanup.
“We have an issue with some pigeons roosting above the retail buildings in the Main Street Ramp,” said James Flottmeyer, Parking Utility Coordinator for the City of La Crosse.
According to Flottmeyer, the problem is more than 20 years in the making. The rooftops once separated from the ramp by a divider are now the place many pigeons call home.
“Over the years, they’ve pecked at the insulation to get in on top of the roofs,” Flottmeyer said.
The problem caught the attention of city officials this summer.
“When we had that big rain event at the end of July. Seven inches,” Flottmeyer said. “It caused some problems, because there’s enough of it up there when it got wet, then it gave off an odor.”
Aside from an odor, the pigeon waste poses health risks to people passing by.
“There are potential health issues with any concentration of animal droppings, including pigeon droppings,” said James Cherf, Owner of By James Gallery. “So, people should dispose of and handle those droppings in an appropriate fashion.”
The clean up is expected to begin at the end of the month. Crews will work to reseal the space between the parking ramp and the business roofing.
“The general public won’t notice the difference at all,” Flottmeyer said. “It’s happening in a confined space between the roof and the bottom of the ramp. So, the cleaning companies will come in, hose down the pigeon droppings that are up there to keep the dust down. Then, they’ll use brooms and shovels to haul it all out.”
With no clear timeline set, business owners hope the repairs are finished before winter hits.
“We are a small city in the middle of the wilderness, so we have lots and lots of food sources for pigeons outside of the city,” Cherf said. “When it starts getting to be more inclimate weather, a lot of these birds do come into our community to harbor.”
The cleanup is by no means a final solution, but it is yet another way the downtown community is coming together to address the pigeon population.
“It’s unrealistic to expect that we’ll ever be able to eradicate pigeons in our downtown area short of eradicating the species,” Cherf said.
This is the second year Downtown Mainstreet, Inc. is using the pigeon-feed contraceptive program to lower numbers of the local pigeon population.
Cherf reminds people that La Crosse does enforce a no feeding policy in city parks. Feeding the pigeons attracts them into the downtown area and encourages population growth. The no feeding policy also extends to squirrels and other wildlife.
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 | Dec 1, 2017 | Pigeon Patrol's Services
A pensioner who fatally shot a pigeon as it perched in a neighbour’s tree has been fined £1,300.
Peter Lister used his air rifle to shoot the bird in its wing, Oxford Magistrates’ Court heard last week.
The RSPCA was called after a member of the public discovered the injured wood pigeon, which was taken to a vet and put down due to the extent of its injuries.
The 70-year-old Oxford artist pleaded not guilty, insisting he had nothing to do with the pigeon’s death.
The bird was wounded on January 30 in Southmoor Road, Jericho in a garden neighbouring Lister’s home.
Lister refused the RSPCA’s request to interview him and was described by the charity as ‘uncooperative’.
He denied shooting the bird, despite the pellet dislodged from the pigeon matching one of two air rifles owned by Lister and seized by the police.
At Friday’s court appearance Lister received a £500 fine and was told to pay £750 costs and a £50 victim surcharge.
Magistrates also issued a forfeiture order on the air rifle used to shoot the pigeon.
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 | Nov 30, 2017 | Pigeon Patrol's Services
Starting on May 7, 2016, every weekend evening through midsummer saw the artist Duke Riley setting fly two thousand pigeons from atop an old battleship in the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Fitted with tiny LED lights, they traced graceful illuminated meanders in the gathering night, before a bell rang them back to their coops. Fly by Night was one of Riley’s typically ambitious interventions, this one completely legal — a commission by Creative Time — as opposed to, say, the time in 2007 when he immersed a homemade spherical submarine of Revolutionary War–era design in New York Harbor and piloted it within yards of the Queen Mary before an armada of law enforcement fished him out. “The FBI didn’t think it was so funny,” he remembers of that episode. “They still have some kind of open file on me.” He was eventually able to get the sub back.
Riley, 45, is known for spectacular ventures with elements of poetry and provocation, usually staged in liminal zones where city meets water and sky: a chaotic naval joust between improvised vessels in a reflecting pool in Flushing Meadows Park; a temporary tavern full of drunk revelers built on swampland off the Belt Parkway. These enterprises tend to make news, as did, for instance, the time in 2012 when Riley set homing pigeons with Cuban cigars in tiny harnesses to fly from Havana back to their home in Key West.
Riley traces both his maritime and his avian interests back to his childhood, which he spent around Boston and on Cape Cod. He remembers hanging around a pigeon club in the Dorchester area: “It looked like a sports bar, but instead of pictures of athletes on the wall it was just pictures of pigeons,” he says. When he moved to Providence to attend the Rhode Island School of Design, he lived in a house with pigeons. He became a tattoo artist there as well, a practice he continues on occasion. But his formal subject at RISD was painting, and he later earned a master’s in sculpture from the Pratt Institute, setting up a studio art practice that is just as integral to his work.
Riley’s current exhibition at Magnan Metz is a two-parter: A large temporary space across the street from the gallery displays new work, made in the wake of Fly by Night; and in the gallery itself is a mini-retrospective of past pieces and project artifacts, including his original submarine. The show lends aesthetic grounding and context to the performance-style works, and tinges Riley’s rapscallion energy with introspection and melancholy. “The studio practice is extremely important to me functioning as a human and artist,” Riley says. Wearing his trademark fedora, he’s made it back to the gallery despite a hangover from the show’s opening party the night before. “Starting with a blank piece of paper and creating another world — even when the projects are happening, it’s an important part because I’m thinking.”
In the past year, those thoughts have turned brooding, related to the presidential campaign and outcome. “A lot of the work has to do with the political climate in the months following Fly by Night, when I was dismantling the show, then moved my birds back onto my roof in Red Hook,” he says. The connection was a feeling of threat. Late fall and early winter is when pigeons are most vulnerable to raptors, after migratory birds are gone and small animals have entered hibernation, Riley explains. “And the time when all these hawks were around was just after the election.” In more ways than one, predation was in the air.
Riley processed his feelings in a series of elegant paintings, presented in the manner of a naturalist’s almanac, of the raptors that threaten pigeons in New York City: goshawk, peregrine falcon, red-tailed hawk, and Cooper’s hawk. He made tile mosaics that depict raptors clutching pigeons as they swoop skyward. “Everyone in the pigeon community respects the course of nature, but even so, when you work with these birds you realize that they’re sentient beings that have feelings,” he says. “They establish relationships with other birds. They’re these beings that are terrified of the hawk. I was thinking of that stuff, and the feeling of trying to protect the people, and protect your loved ones.”
One of Riley’s signature large-scale drawings, which abound in references and riotous detail, presents the Navy Yard battleship with its upper strata rendered as a kind of Tower of Babel, featuring, amid much else, different varieties of pigeon coop architecture used around the world. The ship was a refuge, he says: self-contained and moored at the Navy Yard, itself a secluded space, all within New York City, which for all its faults remains an open-minded place. “It has always been a place of greater tolerance, as most port cities throughout history have been,” Riley says. In one area of the drawing, amid the mermaids and fish and assorted flotsam found in New York’s waterways, hammerhead sharks are attacking robed Ku Klux Klansmen, an allegory of resistance and revenge.
The exhibition’s centerpiece is a series of nearly one thousand portraits in profile of pigeons, each identified by name, breed, and their flock or owner from among the city’s die-hard subculture of pigeon fliers. The portraits are made of fabric embroidered via a computerized process, then stretched over canvas and hand-painted, so they are precise likenesses of members of Riley’s flying armada. (An album of photographs of all two thousand pigeons, yearbook-style, is on hand for those wishing to verify.) A few of the pigeons were veterans of Riley’s 2012 Key West project. Most were borrowed from other fliers and returned afterward. Riley retains around two hundred birds near Red Hook. He flies them in the late afternoon, for a work break with his assistants. “We call it pigeon o’clock,” he says.
Riley titled this show Now Those Days Are Gone, and while the reference is kept vague, the elegiac feeling is impossible to miss. It can apply to the national climate, and just as well, Riley hints, to a mid-career taking of stock. “I wouldn’t call it activism, but most of the work I’ve done has a sense of optimism about what is possible, of empowerment,” he says. “After [Fly by Night] I needed time to think about how I was looking at things, and whether some of the methods I’ve used in the past even make sense.”
It can apply, as well, to New York City and the piers, marshes, and estuaries that Riley has explored for years, semi-wilderness zones that invigorate a city’s culture, not just its ecology. In 2012, Riley’s stained-glass pieces commissioned by the MTA went up at a Rockaway subway station just before the Sandy storm; one panel depicted bungalows swept out to sea. Since then, waterfront development continues unabated around the city, squeezing out the remaining cruising sites, artist’s squats, and assorted ungoverned areas. For Riley, this is a loss. “I think it’s intrinsic human instinct that people are drawn to the sorts of spaces where water meets land, these abandoned urban areas where you can operate outside the constraints of society,” he says. “A city needs to breathe.”
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 | Nov 29, 2017 | Animal Deterrent Products
A mystery Brummie spent £60 sending an injured PIGEON from Aston to a wildlife sanctuary in Nuneaton – by taxi.
Shocked sanctuary owner Geoff Grewcock said the centre received a call to say that an injured animal would be arriving in a cab from the city – a distance of 25 miles.
The kind hearted woman had even sent a donation to the Nuneaton and Warwickshire Wildlife Sanctuary – as well as paying £60 for the pigeon’s journey.
Stunned Geoff said “it goes to show what loving, caring people there are out there”.
“It was incredible,” added Geoff, who has run the sanctuary for 16 years.
“The woman had sent the pigeon in the back of a taxi, on its own, from Aston to us here, and even sent a donation for us as well, I could not believe it.”
He explained that the animal lover had found the injured pigeon and taken it along to the PDSA in Aston.
“They said that they would have to put it down but she said ‘No, you are not’,” he explained.
“That’s when she phoned us here. She told us that she would be sending it in a taxi, and she did. It was marvellous, it just goes to show the lengths that some people will go to care for animals, it is incredibly kind.”
He has admitted that he has seen some sights during his time at the animal haven, but none like the arrival of the injured bird at the weekend.
“It was strange knowing a taxi was coming with a pigeon in the back but it goes to show what loving, caring people there are out there,” Geoff added.
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)
