The inability of birds to recognise their own reflection is costing us dear and forcing us to live in darkness - a hormone-crazed crow has (hopefully past-tense) been attacking its own reflection in the upstairs windows. If it had stuck to just bashing the glass that would have been fine, but it’s also chiselled off the paint and some wood beneath the glass - in brand new windows that cost a fucking fortune and not been in a year yet…
Closing the curtains has deterred him by reducing reflectivity (hawk stickers and me constantly running upstairs and chasing him off were both abject failures since crows also hate hawks and get up at dawn - which I very much do not), but the damage is done.
We may even have to get scaffy up to repaint - and given they’re long-lived birds the bastard will likely be at it again next year…
What is it with pigeons (or maybe doves) ? While I was trying to watch Spain vs France last night I could hear thudding and scratching on the flat roof. There’s a pair of the feckers repeatedly flapping and bumping into one another. I’ve seen them doing the same elsewhwere in the garden and even in the neighbouring trees. Is it love ? Is it hate ? Are they just bored ? I ran upstairs and chased them off. That did work.
If they’re anything like the wood pigeons here it’s bird for “Fuck or fight?! Fuck or fight?! Fuck or fight?! … x∞…”. Little fuckers are relentless, fuelled by the field full of cabbages out back!
Maybe I’ll have to get serious about that shotgun - at least this vermin is delicious…
I had a friend who lost his shit due to wood pigeons cooing down his chimney early every morning waking up his kids that caused stress every day - Solution, shotgun…
The story goes before coo -o’clock he plotted himself up in the garden and waited - As the sun began to rise the Pigeons arrived and he let fly a volley, he missed - 5 minutes later they returned and he got trigger happy again - He missed again, actually he did successfully manage to nail his chimney sufficiently for two pots and a bit of re-pointing to be required. The moral here is - shooting at your own house is not so smart.
He eventually saw them off with the aid of his mates Falcon. So effective was the bird whenever he got the hump or pissed off in life he would shout 'Rapppttoorrrr" which either baffled or made people laugh. I lost touch with him years ago and sometimes wonder what the mad bastard is doing…
At (boarding) school the guy in the bed study above me was so annoyed by the crows around the trash at the back of the house that he would throw the window open at 7am and chuck chair legs at them.
You know, those Robin Day chairs where if you leant back long enough a leg would twist and snap off.
One Monday after a leave out (go home) weekend I heard the window being thrown open and thought “here it comes, swearing and chair legs”.
BOOM! BOOM!
Mentalist had brought back a shotgun to properly sort them out.
I met him again many years later and he’d calmed down a lot. Lovely wife (who was having none of the public school bullshit) and two lovely kids.
At our first place up here we had a massive crow noise problem. There was a patch of woodland nearby with loads of crow’s nests in the tall trees. Most evenings they would go airborne and circle around and around screeching. Literally hundreds of the fuckers.
At our new place it’s woodies, plenty of them. They are also noisy cunts, but mostly in the morning. The cat has offed a couple, but his tether slows him down a lot. If we let him run free, there’d be carnage.
And somewhere in-between (and smaller), you’ve got jackdaws.
I generally love corvids, and this is the first time I’ve had a problem with them. Used to be just jackdaws nesting on the house, and they’re no real problem aside from the occasional chimney-incursion. We got unlucky that we got the crow equivalent of a Reform voter move-in…
