The overengineered solution to my pigeon problem (2022)
maxnagy.com
maxnagy.com
He is not strictly a pet, we try not to turn him into one and hope he will find a spouse in the spring. In the meantime we'll build him a small house that may serve as a nest if he is so inclined. We've read a few books about them and joined a chat of people who keep pigeons, en masse or just adopt a pigeon who needs it.
We do not do that often but about once a week we catch him and sprinkle with a dust against parasites. Pigeons are very pleasant to touch. The feathers have a silky feeling and they are warm, warmer than people.
There are a lot of excrements, of course. We covered the balcony with cardboard to protect and wear a dedicated pair of slippers. Yet we see these little piles with satisfaction because they mean that Theodor eats well and is healthy. By the way it must be a good fertilizer; old books say it was a source of income for the pigeon keeper.
So maybe you can make friends with pigeons instead of shooting them. The balcony is too small anyway (see "The pattern language"). Give them a bath (they love to bath), make them a feeder. (You can strategically position it so that excrements will mostly fall outside.) They are very lovely creatures.
My first language is not English, so I learned this late: pigeons are perceived as dirty birds due to its presence in urban environments, but they are the same species of doves which is perceived as clean. In my first language they are just called "pigeon" and "white pigeon".
The delirious doublespeak of the English public discourse, that is. You dont see it in the rest of the world, ie, in the Mediterranean, even in Europe. There are gigantic plazas with flocks of pigeons that live there as a policy because people dont want to see plazas without pigeons.
For some reason, the English public discourse is hostile to living creatures - the same kind of 'flying pest' rhetoric is being applied to the colorful indian ringnecks that populated the ghastly, damp English public parks. Its like hating things is a cultural trait in the English public discourse, for some reason. Makes one understand where the English tabloid press that spreads hate to everyone comes from.
In the US though, I frequently find people freaking out if they see any insect. There's a zero-tolerance policy for any living creature indoors. They are almost always killed. It leads to a disconnect between human beings and any other life. Other creatures are always a distant presence in zoos or on TV although exceptions are made for pets.
This shows up in language too. Instead of saying, a bear was killed for straying into settled human land or breaking into a house, the phrase used is "the bear was euthanized" (still accurate) or "the bear was destroyed" as if it was a piece of furniture. To contrast this with, say India, even tigers and elephants that kill, are mostly tranquilized and moved deep into a forest. This is very alien in the US where the trigger-happy reaction is to kill the animal.
Indeed, that's a good way to put it. I havent noticed it before. Its not only pigeons, parrots etc. Its all living creatures. It looks like the Angloamerican culture literally hates independent living creatures.
Seems it worked because the balcony was spotless. I’ve seen similar on European churches.
As of 2025 the pigeons are back and version 2 with aiming and a microphone array for target acquisition is still work-in-progress. I’m heading to bed now, but I’ll happily answer any questions tomorrow.
My setup also had its occasional false positives but that’s not a problem if all you do is spray a bit of water around. I also looked into yolo, but I couldn’t find any good datasets of pigeons. Nowadays that’s no problem anymore as you can just use models like meta’s segment anything that do zero-shot bounding boxes… if you have the GPU to run it.
But even with an llm backbone you’d still need some setup to detect when to query the llm. And then you already have a low-false-negative pigeon detector that may be sufficient for your use case.
From the article: "One study found that, between 1941 and 2004, there were just 207 reports of pathogens transmitted from pigeons to humans – anywhere in the world. In all, there were 13 recorded deaths. The true number may be higher, but it would have to be off by several orders of magnitude to compete with the scale of infections from other domesticated animals – particularly some of those with more favourable reputations."
I occasionally (2x per week per location) feed a group of pigeons both in my apartment building's garage as well as my grocery store's open parking lot. They love sunflower seed kernels (unsalted since salt can be really bad for them) which has led to me hoarding sunflower seeds every time I go food shopping. They now recognize my car and swoop in as soon as I drive up to a parking spot (which is not consistent at the grocery store). Hopefully, one day I'll convince myself to stop/slow working and dedicate my free time to studying animal communication and behavior with some ML involved.
Many places it is illegal to feed the birds. Media has created this stupid meme where people think it’s a hobby to over feed birds in cities.
I don't follow social media at all so not sure if there's a trend going on about feeding birds. A few times someone has shown me clearly fake (i.e. spliced together) videos of animals being "rescued" and living with families. They do make me angry because they are clearly made for views.
Yep. To contract anything, you have to eat or lick the pigeon, eat or lick its droppings, and the pigeon needs to have salmonella etc, right at that moment.
When I first saw how two crows shared a pigeon I was impressed.
Brutality is lazy. Dealing with animal overpopulation by introducing carnage. I know nature is indifferent but Homo sapiens should not be.
I’m not sure why it worked. They either can see the thread and get put off, or they don’t see it and freak out when they land on it. I’ve tried both black and white thread and both seem effective. It did snap once probably due to a pigeon being caught out but that’s not a problem.
It doesn’t getin my way either as the thread is loose enough for me to rest my arm on the handrail without it breaking.
My balcony has been crap free for about a year now and it cost like £2 to do.
They seem to really like peanuts and, if you offer them shell included, it's a somewhat selective package tailored to them (although great tits try, you may bribe them with sunflower seeds in selective feeders). I read reports of people sometimes receiving gifts from befriended crows in return, too, so it's possible to form complex relationships. Anyway, the downside is their beautiful singing voice... Magpies are a little less noisy, but they are very shy. Crows also seem to attack birds of prey, so you may not get blessed by the occasional falcon or hawk sighting anymore, if a murder of crows protects your balcony.
We found your HN account craw craw craw.
Food. Now.
May 2022, 103 comments - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31377985
Also, ended up swapping the Pi I started with to a jetson.
I don't think the pigeons will attack your network any time soon in the foreseeable future.
I'm very disappointed there is no video of this weapon in action.
A fun expansion would be to play a soft sound before shooting for familiar customers.
They are adapted to city noise, honking, construction sites... Unless you use flash powder charges (like they do at airports), noise won't scare them reliably. And your neighbors, dogs and the cool birds won't be happy about frequent reality shattering explosions. The stuff they use at airports got enough power to blow off hands.
That doesn't sound stupid to me. Rather it sounds like they're willing to put with a lot of annoyance in order to get food.
Do you commonly see other birds disfigured because they kept ignoring deterrents? No?! That's because pigeons are fucking stupid.