Banishing Birds to Nature, Gently, Soars as Industry

The bird busters are out there, right now probably, armed with nets, stuffed animals, sticky tape, even border collies--all battle implements against an enemy that munches incessantly, tweets noisily and leaves calling cards no one wants.

With wetlands, fields and forests that are natural homes to migratory birds disappearing beneath suburban sprawl, and Canada geese, coot and swallow populations booming, birds do hundreds of millions of dollars of damage a year making their homes in places considered people territory. They fly into airplane engines, graze the smooth grass of putting greens into dirt, make muddy nests under the eaves of million-dollar homes and gum up hospital air-conditioning systems with their germ-carrying feces.

Until recently, people handled birds too numerous to be cute the old-fashioned way--with bullets or poison.

But as the bird problem gets stickier, and environmentalists increasingly take the rights of fowl under their wings, the business of getting birds to roost somewhere other than the plum habitats man has unwittingly created for them is beginning to take flight.

“Anyone can go out there and just throw bait or set a trap, but then you have a bunch of dead birds lying around, which doesn’t exactly add to your popularity,” said Bruce Donaho, who started his business, Bird-B-Gone, in the bedroom of his Mission Viejo home in 1992 after a pigeon dropping landed on his dining companion at a Laguna Beach restaurant.

Today the firm sells spikes, netting and wire to keep birds from roosting where they’re not wanted. This isn’t bird feed we’re talking about. Bird-B-Gone has 50,000 clients, including Disneyland and Sea World.

‘Bird Control’ Yields More Firms, Profits

In the last six years the number of companies that specialize in the new industry, called “bird control,” has jumped from fewer than 500 to more than 3,000, according to a trade magazine called Pest Control. No one has tracked how much money the firms take in overall. But one sector of the industry, companies that manufacture nets, repellents and other products to discourage birds, does more than $30 million in sales annually, up from $8 million five years ago. And the number is expected to grow as more land is developed and avian wildlife increasingly comes into conflict with man’s clean stucco housing and backyard fountains.

The number of dog trainers who sell or rent the use of border collies and other breeds to chase birds away from lakes, swimming pools and anywhere else they congregate is on the rise too. There were fewer than half a dozen such businesses nationwide a decade ago. Today there are more than two dozen just in California, according to the Humane Society of the United States.

“We’re seeing a change in mentality toward birds, that people want to get rid of them without causing them harm,” said Stephanie Boyles, wildlife caseworker with People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, in Norfolk, Va.

Boyles said thousands of golf courses, airports and other businesses across the country have contacted the group in the last two years for suggestions on dealing with birds.

“As crazy as it may sound, this is a big problem all over,” Boyles said. “When you have a corporate pond or a golf course or a tall building or whatever, you are creating the perfect place for birds to live. But that many birds can create a real health and safety problem. Then the next problem is how to get rid of them in a humane way.”

The problems are not pretty. Swallows leave mud caked on houses and churches. Pigeon droppings obscure the million-dollar facades of Las Vegas casinos and the historical stained glass of churches. Coots chew well-tended lawns down to dirt. Bird nests in electrical lines ignite.

The number of birds making the mess keeps getting bigger. A decade ago Canada goose populations were so small it was an endangered species. Today there are more than 2 million of the birds in the United States, according to the National Audubon Society. Coot populations have not been measured, but ornithologists believe they are on the rise. And the snow goose population in North America is up from 2 million four years ago to more than 5 million today.

The birds are migratory by nature. But for many of them, the digs are just so good in places like Southern California--relative warmth year round, lakes kindly provided by golf courses, no natural predators--that they stick around for most of the year, said John Steuber, assistant state director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

“Some animals have just adapted to humans much better than others,” Steuber said. “This time of year there’s not a lot of green grass out there that’s not irrigated. It so happens that California has 30 million people, and a lot of these people interface with wildlife on a daily basis. There’s a lot of conflicts.”

In Southern California the conflicts are numerous enough to keep the bird control business brisk, even though getting rid of birds the nice way does not come cheap. While exterminators will poison hundreds of birds on a property for less than $1,000, hiring someone to install specialized netting to discourage birds from nesting on the roof of an average-size supermarket runs to $5,000 or more.

A Redondo Beach firm called Bird Barrier America Inc., founded in 1993, is the second-largest manufacturer of bird repellents in the country. Its revenue is growing by more than 50% a year. It has a newsletter called “Bird Droppings,” and clients include Sea World and Walt Disney World. The federal government has installed its netting on the Capitol to keep birds from doing to our elected representatives what comes naturally.

Raymond Rich, a Manhattan Beach entrepreneur whose business is called Advanced Bird Control, scales bridges across the state for Caltrans to keep swallows from nesting on girders, a problem the agency says can cost the government hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. Because swallows are protected under state law, a single swallow family’s nest can postpone seismic retrofitting projects for months until the birds depart.

Last month, Rich climbed into an Inglewood church steeple where nesting pigeons have left a 5-foot pyramid of droppings to install netting and spikes to keep them out. This month’s project is to scale a hangar at Edwards Air Force Base where resident sparrows are mucking up the newest space shuttle.

“Buildings are perfect for birds, and we’re putting up more and more buildings,” Rich said. “To the birds, we’re just providing them nice, new cliffs to nest on. Someone’s got to shoo them off.”

A Hefty Bill for the Nation’s Airlines

The bird problems are weightier than they sound, especially at airports.

The Federal Aviation Administration estimates that airlines spend more than $300 million annually to repair damage from 2,000 to 3,000 bird strikes. The strikes--defined as any time a bird and a plane come into contact--have resulted in the loss of 20 civilian aircraft and 95 lives since 1960, according to FAA statistics.

For golf courses and suburban developments, whose man-made lakes and wide expanses of greenery are prime homes for birds, goose and coot droppings do tens of millions of dollars a year in damage, said Jeff Bollig, spokesman for the Golf Course Superintendents Assn. of America in Lawrence, Kan.

“We’ve created this problem ourselves in many cases, and then you have to decide, can you cohabitate with the waterfowl that’s there? Sometimes you cannot,” said Brian Williams, golf course superintendent at the Los Angeles Country Club on Wilshire Boulevard.

“If you kill them, the attraction is still there for more birds. The birds are really innocent in the whole situation. So golf courses are realizing they have to attack the reason the birds are there, rather than attacking the birds.”

Not everyone lives by that credo. Golf courses across Southern California regularly hold “coot shoots,” which are closely regulated but legal under state law. Airports hire hunters to shoot gulls, Canada geese and other birds that get sucked into planes. Supermarkets buy contraptions called “poison perches,” coated with lethal substances that seep up through birds’ feet.

But increasingly, even those who haven’t given up such lethal methods entirely are trying another way.

“We still kill birds; we trap them and euthanize them, we take as many as we can without making a big deal out of it. Just like a farmer protecting his fields, we have a lake to protect. But people really get all over us about it,” said Tom Buckowski, biologist at Lake Mission Viejo, a man-made lake in south Orange County.

“So we’re trying new things. We put up flash tape, we install noisemakers, we put up fences around the shoreline. We have thousands of coots alone on the lake. The best we can do is herd them out of really sensitive areas.”

In Irvine, the Woodbridge Homeowners Assn. in December gave a dog named Max a tryout to see if he could get rid of the more than 2,000 coots that make the property home. The 2-year-old dog was trained to harass but not kill coots.

And at John Wayne Airport, authorities spent $810,000 two years ago to plant buffalo grass to discourage bird flocks that had become hazards to airplanes. The tall, spiky grass discourages birds from nesting. Airport workers also use noisemakers to scare the birds, collect trash that attracts them, and have appealed to local restaurants and fast-food outlets to do the same.

Before the program was implemented, dozens of birds a year were sucked into airplane engines during takeoffs from John Wayne. Since then there have been two such incidents, said airport spokeswoman Kathleen Campini Chambers.

On a recent afternoon Doug Snowden, whose company, the Bird Division, is 3 years old, was scaling an Aliso Viejo tract home, putting up netting to keep swallows from nesting under the eaves.

Using a high-pressure hose, Snowden washed off the mud. Then he drilled hooks into the house to hold the nets.

“You can’t believe how cute these birds are. I mean they’re just really adorable, the babies especially,” Snowden said while stringing a net. “But when they drop little presents at you from the sky, they stop being cute fast.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Bye-Bye Birdie

Humane ways of keeping birds at bay have become big business. More than 3,000 firms cater to this need.

(Ledge) Bird-Flite: Used on ledges, chimneys, beams and signs

(Billboard) Clean Sweep: Mounted on the tops of billboards to keep birds from landing

Zon Gun: Propane-fired cannon makes thunderclap sound that scares birds and other wildlife

(Street light) Daddi Long Legs: Rooftops, air-conditioning units and street lights

Screech Owl: Rotates in the wind, emitting predator sounds such as the cry of a hawk

Source: Bird Barrier America Inc.