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Bird control tips for government agencies
Editor’s note: Governments are tasked with bird control as part of their pest management efforts. Birds, their droppings and nesting materials can cause health risks to humans and create other problems on public buildings and grounds. The following is the second of a two-part series on bird control in local and state government. The first part showed how the California community of Newport Beach developed a bird control program in a maintenance yard.
The second part, below, has advice from Cameron Riddell for local and state government officials on how and where to start if their community or facility has a bird problem. Riddell is president of Carson, Calif.-based Bird Barrier America, Inc., an inventor and manufacturer of bird repellent products. — Michael Keating
According to Cameron Riddell, “Birds, their droppings and nesting materials can cause serious health risks to humans. There have been many documented cases of humans contracting diseases in areas with bird infestations, beginning with Histoplasmosis and West Nile Virus.”
“Worse,” Riddell adds, “In addition to the problems the city of Newport Beach noticed (in its maintenance yard pest control project), birds can also cause slip and fall accidents, raising insurance rates, and attract bugs and rats, increasing the need for an even-higher pest control budget.”
Riddell has the following three pieces of advice for local and state government officials on how and where to start if their community or facility has a bird problem:
- 1. Treat it like any project and begin with research: What kind of birds are they? What times of day do they appear? What are the flight/roosting/nesting patterns? What do the birds find desirable about the area (food, shelter, vantage point)? Think ahead. Where would the birds go if the current area were not available or desirable? Is that property also the responsibility of your government agency?
- 2. When it comes to the budget, realize that the problem is costing your agency money today. Solving a bird problem is not an expense; it’s the elimination of one.
- 3. Choose the project’s installation partner wisely, as most of the value (and the cost) is in the labor, and an agency only wants to do this once. Bird Barrier has a free referral service, and all of the installers are well versed in humane bird control using a variety of methods. Use the “Find an Installer” link in the lower left of this page. Or, read about other buildings and the installers that have solved their bird infestations here.
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