Oh how wrong you were. We don’t have a hungry squirrel. We don’t have mice, rats, possums! or any other sort of mammal. Yes, possums was the suggestion when we searched the internet. Obviously it wasn’t taking into account that the cherry tree we were concerned about was in England. Anyway, within 12 hours of putting up the camera all became clear. This picture is very grainy but if you look carefully you will see that the offending party is a pigeon. The reason the ends of some branches still have leaves is because try as he might to perch, they will not take his fat weight. Fat from our cherry tree! Thankfully he is too stupid to realise that if he sat on the branch below and twisted his ugly little bird brain round he could reach what he’s left from below. Anyway, it also
accounts for the broken branch, which is how he learnt it won’t bear his weight. Now the question is, what can we do about it?
Our Master has immediately suggested his usual answer, which is buy a shotgun. However, as always that has been vetoed by our Mistress. Other suggestions have been to let Shadow spend long enough in the garden to deal with the problem ‘naturally’ and then eat pigeon pie for a few weeks. (You should be aware there is more than one of them!). Our Mistress favours the solution we found for the crows. You may remember we had a serious rogue crow who pecked at the window on the landing from dawn onwards… however early dawn was. Having tried all the usual bird solutions, except the shotgun, our Mistress hit on the idea of putting up a rather real looking owl sculpture. He sits atop the porch keeping an eye on things and we haven’t had a crow problem since. The owl is very realistic and is quite a nice feature. There is just one small problem. The owl came from a garden centre in Belgium and it would be quite a journey to go and buy another. Funnier still would be arriving to find they don’t have them anymore. Now the search is on to find a realistic bird of prey that is big enough and convincing enough to persuade the pigeons to move out. Sadly, the by-product may be that we don’t have any other birds in our garden either, except perhaps birds of prey looking for a mate!
Anyway, I’m off to redeploy the camera to see what else I can find out about life in our garden.
Happy Sunday
Aristotle
You can find short stories to read at www.alfiedog.com
Alfie’s Diary – the Book as well as our other books are available HERE
Hi Ari – I too, and my neighbours, have a pigeon problem, caused by another neighbour that we can’t approach setting out often as many as 9 to 11 bird feeders for the little birds, which have been taken over, in the main, by a flock of feral pigeons. Finding my back steps and patio covered in guano one day, reminiscent of the floor of a hen coop, I saw red! But of course, we can’t just ‘pop them off’ these days, as your Master suggested, it’s now against the law! So I Googled a lot, and came up with a Super Soaker from Amazon, magic – now they see me coming and move. And the trick is to get them again and again as they’re wheeling about, confusing them, then the area’s not so appealing. Tell your Mistress that fake owls, and kites that look like birds of prey, with telescopic poles to fly them from, can also be bought from Amazon! I haven’t had to do that yet! But I don’t have to hose down outside at the back nearly as much either! Good luck! ?
Thank you. We’re trying a different approach which Alfie will tell you about when it arrives. If that doesn’t work I’m going to volunteer to be the one responsible for the super soaker as it sounds like fun.
Have a woofly day
Ari
haha…wel done! We have a pigeon problem here too. Don’t eat my cherry trees though. The farmer who farms the field around us though had his crop of Rape decimated despite scarers banging off every 15 minutes dawn till dust, parking cars in his field with a mannequin ( I kid you not) dressed as a real human, complete with hat and a toy rifle. They still ate his crop….those that didn’t are sat in my garden each morning eating the grass and pooping on the garden toys and furniture!
Well done with the mowing. I wasn’t popular for having really bad diarrhoea overnight and needing a lot of cleaning up this morning. Apparently the puddle I drank from yesterday wasn’t such a good idea! Anyway, I’ll let you know if our solution works – you’ll have to wait to find out what it is!