Victory is oh, so sweet, dear readers, and my team just came out on top in a battle that couldn’t be won, indeed had already been lost irretrievably long ago, or so it seemed. I’m about as elated as I’ll be if Ukraine finally kicks Russia’s ass, or Kamala consigns Trump to the ash heap of history, where he can sit looking stunned as he waits to be dragged off to prison. It was that kind of triumph.
A bit of a recap is in order.
Over the years I’ve posted a couple of after-action reports from the Bird Wars here at our condo in beautiful Mahone Bay, detailing our hilariously unsuccessful efforts to do something, anything, about an unholy infestation of garden-variety Rock Pigeons, A.K.A. “common city pigeons”, little flying shit-sacks that they are. You can read about it here, if you’re inclined (as really you should be, these are gripping narratives of fortunes squandered and reputations lost in the crucible of mortal combat):
Long story short, we were under avian siege. No kidding, the roof of our building, attractive to the nasty little parasites owing to the large pool of standing water that’s always collecting on the flat sections, had for years been a teeming biomass of grubby, incessantly flapping airborne poo-bags (pro tip: never install a flat roof in the Maritimes). It was Pidgie Paradise up there, which made it Homeowner Hell for all of us down here. Understand, all these insufferable creatures do – apart, presumably, from making more pigeons – is eat, flap around in circles, moult, and defecate. Stress defecate. Oh boy, do they defecate. Folks, no fooling, they can crap their own weight in an average afternoon, more if the grub is plentiful (as it usually is in this touristy town full of pubs and eateries), and they were turning our otherwise idyllic locale into a filthy, guano-plastered, bird-bothered dystopia.
They were relentless, and goddammit, the dirty dive-bombing excrementalists were apparently unconquerable. We tried everything we could to get them to go away (well, everything lawful; for reasons surpassing understanding, it’s illegal to kill the useless, overabundant little scat bandits). Baited wire cage devices similar to lobster traps, meant to capture them by the dozen, didn’t nab even one of the feathered cockroaches. They all but laughed at the silly contraptions, and pretty much buried them in foul, viscous pigeon poo, I assume as a gesture of contemptuous superiority (you’re going to have to do better than that, monkey-boy). Next came wind-powered, spinning, mirror-surfaced dazzlers, certain, we were assured, to shock and disorient them, as the unexpected stroboscopic stimulus tapped right into the fight-or-flight nerve clusters of their wee pidgie brainstems, thus putting them off the joint for good. The flashing whrligigs blinded local drivers but otherwise served only to attract even more pigeons, who seemed drawn like moths to the brilliant reflected sunlight. Then we tried ultrasonic noise-makers, supposed to drive them nuts and put them to flight, which either made no such noise at all (how could we tell?) or belted out tones beyond the range of human hearing that your typical pigeon finds perfectly agreeable, or perhaps even soothing. Finally, a crack outfit of exterminators, billed as your pest-fighters of last resort when all others have failed, was deployed amid much fanfare, only to be routed in a series of pitched battles so humiliatingly lopsided that they decided it wouldn’t be right to charge us anything for their failing efforts. One day, after a long, losing campaign, they simply packed up their gear and left. Nothing helped! Resistance was futile! It was crazy-making.
I was about ready to run a length of bell wire into our rooftop pond/giant bird birth, and give ‘em all a couple of hundred kilowatts of gentle persuasion, law be damned, when one of our neighbours announced he might have found an answer.
He’d done extensive research. There was a new and revolutionary technological approach.
Get the Hell outta here, I said, remembering the abject failure of assorted dazzlers and ultrasonic sound cannons.
No really, he said. It’s based on the distortion of natural ambient magnetic fields.
Get the Hell outta here, I said.
No really, he said, it works like this: pigeons, like many bird species, navigate not just by sight but by sensing small variations in the Earth’s natural magnetic field. It’s like they have an internal compass. That’s how various sorts of birds manage to stay on track during those incredibly long migrations, critters like Arctic Terns, which make seasonal sojourns of over 12,000 miles each way between their summer and winter habitats, and that’s how “homing” pigeons can be so unerring in delivering their messages to and fro. So, what these guys have invented is a set of emitters that generate countervailing magnetic fields around the building, at frequencies that overwhelm the natural ones that pigeons use to keep their bearings. It disorients them to the point that they’re sick to their stomachs, like they’ve got vertigo, making them feel like people do in those carnival funhouses where the floors aren’t level, and the lines of perspective are all wacky. They can’t stand it. They turn around and book it the hell out of there just as fast as they can flap.
No frigging way, I said.
No really, he said. It’s becoming all the rage, everywhere pigeons are a pain in the ass. It’s marketed under the brand name Flock Off.
That’s what sold me. Flock Off. Anything with a name like that had to be worth a try. Even if it cost a fortune, which it did.
Now, was I skeptical? Sure I was. I’d actually heard the theory about bird navigation and the Earth’s magnetic field, but I wasn’t aware it was anything that had been scientifically proved, and anyway, it seemed to me like it would take more than that to drive the invincible pigeons away from a nice, warm, wishbone-deep pool of water on a roof they could plainly discern with their own beady eyes, without needing the guidance of any sort of internal geo-magnetic compass. My suspicions seemed borne out when we arrived back at our unit a couple of days ago, and there were, as ever, scattered stalagmites of pigeon droppings scattered all about our exterior deck. Yet, there didn’t seem to be any pigeons flying around. Normally, they’d be buzzing overhead all day, tracing lazy figure-eights above the building, entering and leaving the landing pattern, merrily dropping their runny voluminous droppings all over everything and everybody. Not anymore. It was almost spooky, the way they just weren’t there.
So why all the poo? It turned out that the town had experienced a lengthy power outage a few weeks earlier, which had shut Flock Off down, and given the shit falcons a chance to come back and do that thing they do, but now it was back up and running, blasting out the magnetic interference, and the birds were again thwarted.
It worked. God as my witness, Flock Off worked. Look at this picture:
That’s our ludicrously flat roof, with its big pidgie pond at full capacity. On any given day in the Before Time there would have been between fifty and a hundred witless craphawks occupying that space, lounging contentedly all over the place, splishy-splashing in the water, making happy little cooing sounds. Now, not a one. For a few days now, not a single stinking bird. A couple have flown over the building, but kept going, veering away like the place was on fire or something.
They’re gone. Vanquished. Beaten by a form of electronic warfare their many millions of years of evolution could never have equipped them to withstand.
Friends, I’ve only been this delighted three or four times in my whole life. Please, God, the Cosmos doesn’t now decide to balance the books by putting Donald back in the White House. Honestly, this worries me. A dick move like that would be just like the Cosmos, wouldn’t it?
the needlefish 