Wildlife Damage Management, Internet Center for
Date of this Version
September 1970
Abstract
The subject I was asked to talk about this morning is Municipal Bird Control. Our organization was asked approximately a year ago by a rather high level income urban municipality lying adjacent to Columbus, Ohio, a bedroom community so to speak, to come into their area to do a commercial bird control project. The problem species was pigeons. The community was having a blight. Real estate sales in the town had dropped off as a result of the pigeon problem. The taxpayers were getting together and had been harassing the council for about six months to do something about the pigeons. I talked with council and part of this taxpayer group a few months before we were actually asked to start the program. After talking with the council, a taxpayer group, health officers, the local businessmen's organization, and so forth, it was determined that we would attempt municipal bird control in their community. We decided to use a pre-bait bait program with a toxicant of .6% strychnine on whole kernel shelled corn. We looked at all of the other opportunities for control and came down to two applications. One was the avitrol application and the other one was strychnine application. Because it got publicity in the local newspapers, surrounding communities said, "No avitrol, don't send those birds our way." One of the municipalities said they would get an injunction in case this program was established. So we decided not to go with the avitrol program.