{"id":13033,"date":"2017-04-30T06:00:05","date_gmt":"2017-04-30T05:00:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/alfiedog.me.uk\/?p=13033"},"modified":"2017-04-30T06:00:05","modified_gmt":"2017-04-30T05:00:05","slug":"sunday-30th-april-2017-stop-the-pigeon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/alfiesdiary.uk\/index.php\/2017\/04\/30\/sunday-30th-april-2017-stop-the-pigeon\/","title":{"rendered":"Sunday 30th April 2017 – Stop the Pigeon"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Oh how wrong you were. We don\u2019t have a hungry squirrel. We don\u2019t have mice, rats, possums! or any other sort of mammal. Yes, possums was the suggestion when we searched the internet. Obviously it wasn\u2019t 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\u2019s left from below. Anyway, it also<\/p>\n\n\n\n

accounts for the broken branch, which is how he learnt it won\u2019t bear his weight. Now the question is, what can we do about it?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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 \u2018naturally\u2019 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\u2026 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\u2019t 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\u2019t 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\u2019t have any other birds in our garden either, except perhaps birds of prey looking for a mate!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Anyway, I\u2019m off to redeploy the camera to see what else I can find out about life in our garden.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Happy Sunday<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Aristotle<\/p>\n\n\n\n

You can find short stories to read at www.alfiedog.com<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Alfie\u2019s Diary \u2013 the Book as well as our other books are available HERE<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Oh how wrong you were. We don\u2019t have a hungry squirrel. We don\u2019t have mice, rats, possums! or any other sort of mammal. Yes, possums […]<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":10345,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"gallery","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,9,5],"tags":[63,12,58],"class_list":["post-13033","post","type-post","status-publish","format-gallery","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-day-to-day-life","category-gardening-2","category-wisdom-and-experience","tag-aristotle","tag-gardening","tag-wildlife","post_format-post-format-gallery"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/alfiesdiary.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13033","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/alfiesdiary.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/alfiesdiary.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alfiesdiary.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alfiesdiary.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13033"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/alfiesdiary.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13033\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alfiesdiary.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10345"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/alfiesdiary.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13033"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alfiesdiary.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13033"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alfiesdiary.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13033"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}