Birds change their roosting habits
We are very pleased with the results to date Murray Phillips
Palmerston North’s bird scarers are discouraging starlings from roosting in the trees where their poo causes the most problems.
City council horticultural engineer Murray Phillips said the numbers of birds flocking into The Square had reduced by about half, and those that remained were choosing trees that did not have speakers intermittently sounding off at them.
Birds dumping plenty of poo on cars and footpaths have been a longstanding feature of the central city.
Almost $50,000 was spent installing the devices in trees from the library corner of The Square to the ANZ corner and around to Main St. They went live on June 26. Phillips said it was never the intention to drive birds out of The Square altogether, but to disperse them.
‘‘And we are very pleased with the results to date. At this stage, we would consider it a success.’’
Two weeks on, Phillips said it was noticeable that the birds were no longer arriving in such large flocks.
Those that did begin to settle in the trees around the perimeter of The Square were most likely to move on when they heard a burst of starling distress calls from the speakers.
Some of them flew away from The Square altogether, while others settled in trees surrounded by grass or gardens where they were not a problem.
The evergreen magnolias in the median strip and the pohutakawa between the library and Main St seemed more popular than ever.
The amount of bird poo that needed to be cleaned from footpaths around The Square in the mornings had more than halved, he said.
Phillips said he hoped the birds that had moved on to other locations would form new habits, and that the cycle had been broken.
The council would turn its attention next to the trees on Main St outside the re-branded Conference and Function Centre, which would be fitted with sonic scarers using a pitch that humans would not be able to hear.
But Phillips said the noises from The Square scarers were intermittent and tended to blend with the sounds of traffic and bird noise and were not overly intrusive.