Got a pigeon problem?
Dealing with birds required different techniques than other pests. In this video, Scott explains the how and why of dealing with pigeons (and other birds) in your roof.
Do you need to get rid of Pigeons from your roof?
Video Transcription
G’day team, Scotty here from PestX.
Today we are doing pigeon exclusion work, and I say exclusion because culling pigeons is only maybe a tiny part of the job. We’re actually more interested in making the building unattractive for habitation for the pigeons. In fact, it’s the same thing if you’ve got possums, it’s exactly the same issue. We want to make the building unattractive.
You can see it’s an older style building. Typically, these are the buildings that have pigeon problems.
There are particular corridors running through Rockhampton, Mount Morgan, Gracemere, where birds are a problem. In Gracemere it’s not so much pigeons. It’s probably swallows in Gracemere, but nonetheless, older homes typically have these problems. It’s because they’ve got complex roof lines. Most modern homes are just rectangles with the roof.
Nonetheless, they can still get pigeon problems, but they tend not to be in the older areas where the pigeons congregate. So what we’re going to do today is we’re going to be basically just putting some mesh up under the eaves to stop the pigeons getting in, but anyway, let’s go have a look.
So what you can see up here is heaven knows how many years of bird activity, and they’ve put dung in absolutely everywhere, and it’s probably, I don’t know, maybe an inch thick you could see maybe if you’re lucky right there in the end. There you could see half a dozen birds there, and you won’t be able to see on camera, but around here, there’s probably other 30 birds.
Pigeons are dirty damn things. They just live in their own poo. They make nests out of poo. They just crap everywhere and just live in it. So this makes the house basically uninhabitable and there are all sorts of respiratory pathogens in pigeon dung, and if you’re living in it, you don’t want it.
But if you’re a landlord, it’s equally as bad because technically, your house is unlivable, and until you fix the problem, it’s a habitation risk and your tenants have to move out.
So, unfortunately, this is something that has to be dealt with. So once we’ve finished meshing off the outside so the pigeons can’t get in any more, then we’ll actually come up here and we’ll clean all this out and get rid of all this mess, and I can see you won’t be out to see it on camera. But just over here I can see cockroaches at the side here, living in this. So not only have you got the pigeon poo, you’ve got other pests living in the mess as well, around the place. So it really makes a lot of sense.
To stop this. Once we mesh around the outside, though they won’t be able to get back in. They won’t be a ble to nest, and they will simply move on somewhere else in town, so the problem will go away. So it’s not a case of killing pigeons.
Sometimes we do, cull them. But that’s not the single solution. Like the same way you might spray for cockroaches, where you want to just kill all the cockroaches here. We can’t just kill all pigeons because there’s more. Pigeons will just come back because it smells like a nice place to live.
So it’ll be really good. Once we get this cleaned up, it’ll be good to go. So what i’m doing here is we’re actually removing the existing mesh that was put up x number of years ago because it’s full of feathers and poop and all sorts of things. So we’re going to take that down and we’re putting up some new galvanised square mesh so it will last decades because it’s under the eave out of the weather. Now, the reason we’re removing the stuff that’s there is that it’s all broken, so it’s maybe one third of it’s intact. It’s full of holes, etcetera. So it actually did a reasonable job originally.
But it’s now no longer doing its job, so we’re going to replace that. Okay so that’s a wrap folks, we’ve completed this work, so we’ve actually culled some of the pigeons here.
We’ve chased them out of the roof. We’ve got all the eggs and the babies out of the roof. We’ve cleaned the roof out, we’ve mashed off the eaves, and we’ve also meshed off the solar panels so they can’t even use them as somewhere to live. So that actually will fix the problem permanently, and whatever pigeons are left now will simply go away and find new homes.
So that’s pigeon problem solved
Do you need to get rid of Pigeons from your roof?