Donna
I'm Falcon Crazy
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« on: 19-Sep-09, 07:35:33 AM » |
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TAMPA - It's not that Ikea hates birds. They're quite nice, Ikea officials say.
But the Ybor City Ikea that opened this summer is very large and very blue. For some reason, in the weeks after opening, seagulls by the hundreds found the corners of the Swedish home goods store a fine place to roost and were leaving distinctive white trails.
Perhaps the smell of Swedish meatballs from the store cafeteria attracted the birds, but gulls were defiling cars and swarming around customers in the parking lot. Then, Ikea maintenance crews found the white rooftop they installed to reduce energy costs also attracted huge seagull flocks.
"Sometimes, there would be hundreds of birds up on the roof," said Facilities Manager Vladimir Sergienko. "There would be bones, debris, and it would get clogged in the drains — it became a real problem."
So Sergienko hunted for solutions. He looked at barbed wire on the roof or spikes on the building edges. Too brutal, he thought. Then he found something online: A piercingly loud speaker system that blasts out sounds that birds hate.
The sound of predator hawks screeching and seagulls being killed.
The solar-powered Bird Gard Mega Blaster Pro stands on a rooftop pole near the customer entrance, screeching out eight high-fidelity, digitally recorded bird screeches at random times at 120 decibels, roughly as loud as a jet engine.
It's the first time an Ikea store anywhere has installed a bird screech system. And "oh it works," Sergienko said, standing proudly up on the brilliant white rooftop. "You can sometimes see a pack of birds up here and the sound goes off, and poof, they all fly away fast."
A lot of people want to drive away birds lately, from airports to malls to office parks. Aviation officials blame birds for taking down the US Airways flight that landed in the Hudson River.
Scaring away birds is developing into a hot area of science, developed well beyond scarecrows standing in a cornfield.
Some airports install propane-powered noise cannons that blast out booms to mimic gunfire. Some cities go so far as to breed carnivorous predators in downtown skyscrapers to keep down the pigeon population. Fish hatcheries in Florida sometimes use water cannons to protect pools of growing fish.
Tampa has problems with turkey vultures, which flock by the hundreds around downtown buildings.
Some bird screech systems cost just $250. But Ikea didn't mess around, said Joe Seid, owner of Chicago-based Bird-X Inc., which sold the Mega Blaster to Ikea.
Ikea bought the largest model available, a $2,300, 25-speaker system normally used in airports.
"That's a very loud system and can cover 6 or 7 acres," Seid said.
These aren't random sounds, either. The trick to an effective bird repellent system is to speak a language the birds understand, respect, and "scare the daylights" out of them, Seid said.
To deter pigeons, the system blasts the sound of Peregrine falcons defending their territory. To scare Starlings, it screeches out hawk calls. For seagulls, the system blasts a sound gulls find far more distinctive.
"Seagulls are very effectively disturbed by the sound of their own species' distress call," Seid said. The Mega Blaster emits the sound a ring-billed seagull makes when being attacked.
In human language, that might resemble a fire alarm in a crowded theater or "someone on a New York City street yelling 'Help! I've been shot!,'" Seid said. Humans might come to the rescue, he said, but birds see it differently. "They just take off with a powerful instinct to get away."
A few keen-eared Ikea shoppers noticed the system running, said spokeswoman Debra Faulk. So far, only one customer has found it disturbing, she said.
At $2,300, the solution fit with Ikea's low-price philosophy, Faulk said, and was more humane.
"For a bird, it's letting them know there's a predator to me nearby," Faulk said. "I'm going to fly away and I'm going to tell my little bird friends not to come by. So now it keeps the area nice and clean."
Bird experts call the system innovative. Plastic owl models rarely work for long, they say, and you can't cover a parking lot with wires to deter birds.
"I'm from Philadelphia, and you can see the bird spikes all over City Hall there," said Al Asenavage, manager of the 1-2 Tweet exotic bird store in Brandon. "The spikes don't work, and they hurt the birds."
Mark Rachel, a field biologist with Audubon of Florida, said sound systems are the most humane deterrents he has seen, especially compared with spikes or breeding falcons.
"This is an ongoing battle with nuisance birds," Rachel said. As for whether birds find the screeches disturbing, "that's a hard question. They definitely respond to those sounds and decide they're something to avoid."
Other Ikeas shoppers nationwide may start to hear similar artificial bird calls soon. Several Ikea stores with bird issues took notice of Tampa's solution and ordered Mega Blasters for their rooftops
The shop up the road from me has the same type of setup...24/7 you hear the sounds of a falcon to deter the pigeons.
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