Roots 'n' Shoots: DIY Bird Deterrent (Part 1)

Why is RnS Moving to whiskerflowers.wordpress.com?

Google had brought out an algorithm update in May 2017. With previous updates like Panda or Penguin, Mr G had penalized blogs or websites with low quality content and those more focused on aggressive adverts (including multiple ads or pop-up ads in articles). However, many blogs/websites that weren't shady got penalized beyond recovery too and a lot of people lost their income. The May 2017 update has had wide-scale effect on blogs and websites, but without any explanation from Mr G as to why or what it does. RnS has been hit by it too and hard. RnS organic search stats (i.e. users from Google) have dropped by 75% since. Even though RnS is not a source of income, I tried to figure out why RnS is being culled. It seems that it doesn't really have anything to do with RnS per se, but likely because RnS is FREE and not paying for page ranking (via AdWords or Ad Ranking). Now it is likely being aggressively shoved to lower page rankings to accommodate the paid ads.

I cannot rely on Mr G anymore to get RnS' content where it is needed. So I am busy moving RnS to Wordpress where you can find me as Whisker Flowers @ https://whiskerflowers.wordpress.com/

I am also imposing 301 redirects from already moved posts and pages!

- The Shroom - (AKA Whisker Flowers)

Sunday 19 May 2013

DIY Bird Deterrent (Part 1)

During the summer growing season we have had some problems with Black-eyed Bulbuls that help themselves to our tomatoes, raspberries and figs. The nasty little buggers always managed to get to the fruits just when they’ve ripened – the cats aren't doing their jobs of scaring the birds away J!

 
Black-Eyed Bulbul - what naughty little birds!
Pycnonotus tricolor
Snowmanradio, Derek Keats
Wikipedia

So with some old CDs and a bit of creative savvy I made a few bird deterrents. Initially I wanted to purchase one of those reflective bird pyramids, but after seeing the price and surviving a minor heart attack – I decided to create my own based on the same principle.

So birds' visual colour - and light spectrums are different to humans. Humans can see in the 400-750nm wavelength range (the visual light range, indicated on the figure below). Our range has a normalised bell curve (the purple curve on the left side of the figure below) and our optimum colour range peaks at 555nm (which is green). Whereas birds have three optimum range peaks, one at green (508m), blue (445nm) and red (565nm). This makes birds more sensitive to these colours, red being the most prominent. By incorporating red and reflective surfaces into your bird deterrent devices will make your garden a literal eye-sore to birds and they will avoid landing close by.

Bird vision: as compared to human vision.
Top: Electromagnetic spectrum of light (note circle indicates the visible light spectrum); Inductive load & N174, Wikipedia.
Left: Human visual spectrum, with normalised curve superimposed, same axes lables as on right; Vanessaezekowits& BenRG, Wikipedia. 
Right: Bird visual spectrum, L. Shaymal, Wikipedia.

So I took some old scratched up CDs, glued some red and mirror mosaic pieces onto them and voila! It works really well… given the sun is shining J. A lot less expensive than the bird pyramids! Hung one close by the chicken coop to scare off would-be pigeon scavengers that eat all the chicken pellets – don’t worry; it is hung at pigeon-eye level, not chicken eye-level, so the chickens are unaffected J. The CDs swing around when the wind blows, which scatters light across the garden and helps to fend off fruit thieves.




















DIY Bird deterrents, front (left) and back (right) hung from tomato stakes. Now the tomatoes and chicken pellets can be spared!


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