[TowerTalk] Canada geese

[Patrick Greenlee]

Bill, The boating community often recommends plastic snakes to keep 
birds from roosting and pooping all over your boat.  With over 30 years 
of boating experience in the San Diego California region I witnessed 
lots of folks using plastic snakes.  You can tell the new guys at the 
yacht club by their  new plastic snakes. Over time the birds get used to 
the snakes and totally ignore them.

  I know of no long term success with plastic snakes.  Experienced 
boaters I have known agreed that collectively we had never seen a long 
term success using plastic snakes.   Phony owls are also touted but they 
too lose effectiveness fairly rapidly.  I've seen birds perched on the 
owls head pooping on it.

Geese and other birds have hearing that extends higher in freq than 
normal humans.  I say normal because in my mid 20's my left ear went to 
21,500 Hz and my right ear went to about 20,500 Hz.  I could hear bats 
feeding, ultrasonic alarms, etc. Now I wear $6000 hearing aids from the 
VA thanks to small arms fire and other loud noises.

Something that works and doesn't lose efficacy from birds getting used 
to it is ultrasonics used intermittently more or less randomly unless 
used with IR motion detector or other detection apparatus.  I have used 
ultrasonics very successfully to keep away various pests including 
birds.  Places with large flocks of geese have nice lawns "goose 
greased" so badly you can't walk through without getting your shoes 
messed up. I have recommended ultrasonics to lakefront home owners who 
had great success with repelling their Canada geese.  The geese soon 
learned to avoid that lawn and stay on his neighbors lawns farther from 
the transducers.  Word spread and some of his neighbors went ultrasound 
also with great success.  Only a few houses stayed unprotected, a couple 
were only used a week or two a year, did not add ultrasound (that I am 
aware of) but were partially protected by neighbors with ultrasound.

Geese have pretty good ultrasonic hearing.  To them bursts of high 
levels of ultrasound is what having a steam whistle go off in our ear is 
like. Some ultrasound pest repellent gear has selectable freq bands so 
you can avoid bugging cats and dogs or include cats and dogs and they 
will avoid the area too.

Decades back the lab where I worked had an oceanographic tower anchored 
to the bottom of the ocean just off the coast from San Diego.  Seagulls 
used it for a big bird perch and pooped all over everything on it.  
Seagulls were captured and "lightly tortured" within limits of animal 
cruelty organizations and their distress cries were recorded.  These 
were played back at random intervals and worked pretty good but over 
time lost effectiveness.  You don't get used to pain from powerful 
ultrasound, it always hurts if you can hear it.

Patrick        NJ5G

On 2/16/2018 5:03 PM, Bill wrote:
> Try some plastic snakes....
> Bill W2CQ
>
>
>
> On 2/15/2018 9:42 PM, Patrick Greenlee wrote:
>>
>>
>>> Since this not
>>>> where squirrels are out, and the ground hogs appear to still be 
>>>> hibernating I think the
>>>> culprit is a goose.  The coax looks more like it is pulled apart 
>>>> than cut.
>>>>
>>>> Has anyone had a similar occurrence?
>>>>
>>>>
>> Around here (south central Oklahoma) the gophers are bad about 
>> chewing up direct burial cables. Need to use conduit.  They don't 
>> seem to chew up PVC pipe/conduit. A notable exception is the direct 
>> bury phone lines with which I have never had a problem.
>>
>> Many folks don't appreciate the gooses bite.  They can bite quite 
>> hard and have a raspy insides to their mouths.  They bite down hard 
>> and then twist their heads.  Pretty vicious.
>>
>> Patrick
>> _______________________________________________
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>>
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>