What is Pigeon Exclusion?

Making an area as unattractive to pigeons as possible is the goal of pigeon exclusion, which has largely replaced shooting pigeons as a way to get rid of them. Fred Willey is owner and president of Invader Pest Management, based in Glendale, Arizona, and talks here about how this is done.

We do a lot of pigeon control, and when you are doing pigeon exclusion, the goal is to keep the birds away from any structures, whether in a domestic, commercial or industrial setting. All pigeons are, by nature, what we call homing pigeons. That means they will always go home, to wherever they are born, and you don’t want that to be near you.

The goal of pigeon control is to keep them from being able to nest on structures on your property where they will eventually have babies, because then the babies will come back to their home. Then they will have babies there, their babies will have babies there, and then all of a sudden you have huge colonies of pigeons on your property. You will have 200 or 300 pigeons at once, all living close to where they were born.

Pigeon Exclusion Tools

When we talk about pigeon exclusion, we are talking about keeping them out of the house as much as possible. There are a lot of tools out there which we use to accomplish this. They include:

• Spring wire: A wire pensioning system which gives the wire a spring to it, so it will move up and down when the bird tries to land on it. It won’t actually hurt the birds but prevents them from landing. It’s uncomfortable to them so they will stay away.
• Bird spike: They will not land there on these spikes because if they do they will get poked.
• Bird netting: We totally net off areas so they cannot get into or behind that area at all. We use all different types of bird net to accomplish this.
• Other wire products: To keep birds from landing, as above.
• Metal screening: Blocks off areas so the birds cannot congregate there.

Trapping Pigeons

When the pigeon populations are really large, we can also just go in trap the birds and remove them. We do that sometimes on commercial properties, where there are huge flocks of pigeons and the owners have called us in to reduce the population.

In the old days, we used to be able to call the police to get a shooting permit. Then we could go out and shoot the pigeons. Now the gun restrictions have become so tough that you are not allowed to shoot. It’s not because the birds are affected by it; towns just don’t want bullets and pellets in the air. They feel the danger of shooting is much more of a risk to people.

A lot of people choose to shoot their BB guns or pellet guns at the birds. While it may be okay to shoot those birds, remember that if you miss, that pellet is going somewhere, and you can easily hurt someone on the other end. That is why we like to employ these exclusionary techniques instead. Using these humane methods means you are avoiding shooting in town.