By: Dr. Rob Fergus
Almost every inquiry I get about bird problems hides an underlying question of “why the heck is that bird doing this crazy thing?” While the inner workings of a bird mind may be beyond the realm of this article, we can better understand birds and why they do what they do when we start to look at what is important to them.
Bird Needs
Just like humans, birds have needs. On a regular basis they need food, water, sleep, and safety. Seasonally they may be driven to attract or select a mate, build a nest, defend a territory, and raise their young. While birds aren’t sitting around introspectively making wish lists, they do have hormones driving them to satisfy these basic needs. So in some sense we can say that the birds “want” to satisfy these needs. Whenever you are dealing with a bird, you are dealing with an animal specifically designed to fulfill certain needs. Each species has its own set of needs and unique ways of satisfying those needs. Each individual bird will satisfy those needs within whatever range of behavior is available to it and in response to its current circumstances.
Food
Birds have to eat. No food, no bird. What a bird eats and how it finds its food is species specific, and is sometimes the source of conflict with humans. Fruit-eating birds become pests when they eat the fruit we want. Herons become pests when they gulp down our favorite koi in our backyard pond. But knowing what a bird eats and how it gets its food can help us thwart the hungry birds. Nets can keep birds from reaching those blueberries in your garden. Deep ponds can help the fish stay out of reach of a hungry heron. Birds are very motivated by food, since it is such a basic need. So any time you have a pest bird that is motivated by food, you probably have to create some kind of barrier that makes it physically impossible to get the food. Other deterrents—like scary decoys or other menacing visual displays—may not actually distract a bird that is really hungry!
Safety
Birds need to sleep and rest where they are not going to be disturbed or killed by a predator. When starlings or grackles take over a parking lot, or vultures flock to a water tower, they are just doing what their kind has done for millennia. They have to sleep somewhere. When they chose places that are inconvenient for us, the best thing to do is to make it impossible for the birds to be there by taking away their ability to perch or stay put for the night. If that isn’t physically possible, we can make the area appear unsafe. Recorded alarm calls may work to scare birds away, but it may take a lot of alarm calls to overcome the noise of all the other birds in the flock. Since birds in a flock are usually bolder than solitary birds, it can take some serious effort to scare them away—including active harassment by a trained and licensed bird pest control expert.
Nesting
Each species has its unique nesting requirements. Unfortunately, sometimes human structures perfectly fit the requirements some birds are looking for—like protected ledges on your porch that attract robins, or gravel driveways used by Killdeer. The key in these cases is usually to alter the configuration of whatever is attracting the birds so that it no longer suits their needs. Holes birds are nesting in can be blocked and ledges can be made to not hold a nest. Just figure out what opportunity the bird is taking advantage of, and take that opportunity away. Problem solved!
Making a Mess
Birds do not need to make messes. But like all animals, they have to get rid of their bodily wastes. Out in nature, they just do this whenever they have the need, no matter where they are. If birds are hanging around, eventually they are going to leave droppings. It’s unavoidable. So if they are making a mess, that just means they are hanging around because they have found a safe place to loaf, or a food source or something else is attracting them. In these cases the best way to avoid the problem is to take away their ability to hang out, by putting up a physical barrier like bird spikes or a bird spider (http://www.absolutebirdcontrol.com/products/bird-deterrents). If that isn’t an option, making the area appear less safe with some kind of visually threatening or distracting deterrent (http://www.absolutebirdcontrol.com/products/visual-deterrents) may encourage the birds to go elsewhere. But birds are smart enough to figure out eventually if something really is or isn’t a threat. So if you can’t get rid of whatever it is that is attracting them, then it can take constant and shifting efforts to keep the birds uneasy and out of the way.
All bird pest problems are really miscommunications–we’ve created a perfect opportunity for a bird, but we didn’t get the message until the bird shows up. We built it (or planted it), and they came. To really fix the problem we have to take away the invitation. Figure out what the bird wants, how you’ve created the perfect opportunity for it, and then pull back that invitation by changing the configuration of whatever it is that the bird wants. Anything else is going to take a lot more effort over time, and result in continued miscommunications with the birds that are just showing up because no matter what else we do, we’re still giving them an open invitation to come and get whatever it is that they want in order to satisfy their need.
