IIRC, homing pigeons use infrasound (sound waves below 20 Hz) to navigate, so it may be worth trying them instead of ultrasound in the hope common pigeons too would be sensitive to them. That would require some power and a bigger transducer (namely a subwoofer); still a lot better than having to deal with their excrement.
The overengineered solution to my pigeon problem
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Re: The overengineered solution to my pigeon problem
#92Anyone notice how few birds there are nowadays? Used to see them all the time. I live in a bird sanctuary. I see the same 25 birds every day. Used to be thousands. Maybe insects have collapsed. Maybe it's just us. I wish we could stop killing things.
We have a very large yard and lots of trees so I started putting up bird feeders. Now we have more birds than I've ever seen. They're still out there.
Where I live, 200ya they wrote about how large flocks of geese would literally darken the sky. There most certainly are far less birds than there were 200ya, but even 30 years ago there were still, you know, flocks of birds. Flock of birds now is like single digits. I have lived here, rural, since 2018, and there's hardly any birds. Amazingly, I saw a gathering of blue heron not long ago, about of dozen adults. That's insane numbers. But wait... there should be thousands of them. Get out of here with your, "they're still out there." Yeah, a few, I guess.
Re: The overengineered solution to my pigeon problem
#93I hate spikes and nets. Have seen some pigeons die slowly and rot in them. It was horrible and would have kicked someone's ass if I knew who installed them.
Re: The overengineered solution to my pigeon problem
#94I hope that at least one person pauses to consider the pigeons' close relation to us on the family tree of life, the fact that they have feelings and personalities and can experience joy and pain.
That doesn't mean humans can't hate them for shitting everywhere, however. These solutions discussed here aren't fatal or invasive. The birds don't die and they're free to leave.
Do you shit?
Re: The overengineered solution to my pigeon problem
#95I’d love to have an overenginnered (or not!) solution for the starlings in my neighborhood. Their horrible screechy calls drive me mad. But the fact that it’s sound and not poop that’s the motivation probably makes it a more difficult problem to solve, since it relies on both sound (to find where the demonspawn is) and vision (to not hit some random screechy kid).
Starlings can sing melodic songs too, and I don’t mind those, but what I hear most often are their screeches. They are literally doing it right now outside my window. I wonder if it’s a territorial ”song” that I’m hearing more often than Europeans do since they’re an invasive species in the US, or if this particular call is a learned behavior from the population in my city.
The only theoretical solution that I’ve come up with so far is something that listens for the offending sound pattern, verifies that it’s also a “small dark bird” via camera, and then chases it off a water gun or laser or pocket nuke or stern words or whatever. All of that tech is beyond me, but I’ve definitely fantasized about it ever since they showed up here a few years back.
Re: The overengineered solution to my pigeon problem
#96Hi HN! I commented about this project of mine a month ago [0] and decided to write a more in depth blog post about it. Feel free to ask any questions :) [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31024099
I love this project! In the spirit of sharing ideas, I would have probably done this full analog. I’d set up a rudimentary analog break beam detector (like what they use to detect if a garage door is cleared to close) beaming across the balcony, and if so, trigger the relay to shoot the gun!
Re: The overengineered solution to my pigeon problem
#97Re: The overengineered solution to my pigeon problem
#98Re: The overengineered solution to my pigeon problem
#99Did something similar. My wife was upset about the flying rats defecating on her flower pots on the terrace. Those birds are stationary (generally) and slow so I managed to iterate a solution that (a) used a 3w green laser mounted on a webcam with servos and (b) later used a static laser with a mirror that was mounted on a set of servos. I used a stationary 4k webcam. I mapped the whole terrace so I didn't need to us…
3w laser sounds terrifying in itself. Firing it autonomously even more so. Have you made some calculation of how long would direct eye-hit need to last to cause blindness, and how long for a bounced light from bright diffuse object? My guess would be way less than 100ms for direct hit, but I am not sure even diffused reflection would be safe at such power levels.
Re: The overengineered solution to my pigeon problem
#100"Plastic crows Pigeons get used to them"
When i lived in a small appartment with a baclony i was advised to get a (small) statue of an owl to get rid of pigeons. I bought one at our local el-cheapo market and it seemed to do the job. Didn't monitor it though, becuase i didn't care that much.