[Fleecewife]

I know that newly planted corn has to be protected from the birds, which would otherwise peck up a lot of it, but oh woe - I do hate that wretched bird scarer, thumping away and setting the dogs off barking yet again. 
 
I'm also not too chuffed to have dead pigeons raining down on my land when the man with the gun comes lurking (esp when a ewe is lambing - another story)
 
I don't usually complain about anything that goes on around us - live and let live, we all have our living to make - but the bird scarer really gets up my nose.   Roll on the day when the barley will be tall enough for the pigeons to ignore it, or the gas cylinder runs out   

[colliewobbles]

This has become a real problem for us this year - apparently there is a population explosion of pigeons which means there are more and more bird scarers.  One has been installed quite close to our house and my girlie collie Meg is very nervous of guns.  If she's in the garden when this scarer goes off she runs and hides in the house - makes me very sad that even in her own home she is being scared by them.

I do wonder if it is too loud though - it sounds like the lifeboat cannon going off!

Donna

[Bodger]

If you will live in the countryside? I'm not being funny in anyway at all, but the countryside is a living working place.
 
Without the bird scarer the farmer wouldn't have any crops to harvest and the woodpigeons also so play havoc with cerial crops. They taste pretty scrummy too. Gets tin hat on and retires to bunker for the duration.

[colliewobbles]

If you will live in the countryside? I'm not being funny in anyway at all, but the countryside is a living working place.
 
Without the bird scarer the farmer wouldn't have any crops to harvest and the woodpigeons also so play havoc with cerial crops. They taste pretty scrummy too. Gets tin hat on and retires to bunker for the duration.

   I know all of this and accept this point completely - it's just that in the past few months this very loud bird scarer has been placed in the field right next to us and it is ridiculously loud and goes off 3 times every quarter of an hour or so, starting around 6-7am every morning.  That is pretty intrusive and not something I have experienced before having lived in a rural county all my life.  I suspect maybe the pressure is a bit too high causing the exceptionally loud explosion that we are experiencing and of course, the farmer lives a few miles away!

[Bodger]

Has he put it unecessarily too close to you? Does he switch it off at night?
 
Having said that, I definately wouldn't want one under my bedroom window.

[Fleecewife]

If you will live in the countryside? I'm not being funny in anyway at all, but the countryside is a living working place.
 
Without the bird scarer the farmer wouldn't have any crops to harvest and the woodpigeons also so play havoc with cerial crops. They taste pretty scrummy too. Gets tin hat on and retires to bunker for the duration.

Maybe it's because it's so nice and quiet that the bird scarer is so intrusive.  I'm sure there are louder sounds in town, but I don't live there so I don't really know and I have absolutely no desire to find out. Over the gate - I just want a MOAN    I've spent all my life within range of birdscarers and they don't get any better 
 
Colliewobbles - our instrument of mass torture goes off every couple of minutes, but is mercifully on the opposite side of the field.  Could you perhaps ask your neighbour to reposition his so it points at rightangles to your place?  If it points towards you or directly away then it seems to sound louder.
 
 
 
Of course the farmers have to protect their crops, as I said - but it doesn't stop it being annoying     I know just how much our neighbour has spent getting that seed sown, how much he will have to spend to bring it to harvest, then what it will be worth - so it's a huge investment.  I don't mind the scarer being used - I just wish a quieter method worked.  My neighbour has put up a very pathetic attempt at a scarecrow - which had the inevitable rook perched on it, but that is never going to protect a thirty acre field.   I suppose if he used flashing lights to scare the birds it would be even more annoying and we'd all have migraines 
 
 
 
Everywhere has its drawbacks - bird scarers happen to be my least favourite here.

[colliewobbles]

All those things probably worth considering and at least they will stop once the crop gets established - hadn't thought of that.  Guess we will have to grin and bear it.   

[renee]

Strange coicidence. I have just spoken to my mother on the phone and was still chucklig. She is 82 and had had a lot of problems with pigeons this year so she took a pop bootle, pipe lighters for legs, made a big red beak, found some wierd goggly eyes in her sewing room and put on some cardboard wings. Put those on the wrong way round but couldn't be bothered to change them. Has hung the monstrosity in her apple tree. Oh she has also put a hole in the bottom of the bottle so it makes a slight noise sometimes when the wind blows. The pigeons have scarpered but she was sad to admit that the blackbirds and sparrows had also disappeared. Must be one hell of a predator she has constructed

[Fleecewife]

     A very inventive lady 

[Lesley Silvester]

Well done, Renee's mum. I'm sick of the pigeons. Not only do we have wild ones hanging around but there are a couple of men in the neighbourhood who keep racing pigeons. I have to net all my brassicas.

[Sudanpan]

Our neighbouring fields (planted with brassicas) have all got bird scarers at the moment - sometimes it feels like a war zone and then the helicopters come over from RNAS Culdrose and it completes the picture 


One of the gas guns had been orientated so that it pointed directly at our cottage end wall - whenever the gun went off the windows got hit by the resulting pressure/sound waves so it was like a bird was flying into them (which does happen sometimes anyway). Fortunately they have moved the position so now we don't get that effect any more