I prefer the radio in the kitchen in the morning, but when my wife gets there first we have the TV on. TV breakfast programmes are pretty lightweight in my view, especially the London regional one, and especially the last story that’s featured - the one at the end where they say, “and in other news....” But one of those caught my attention this week.

It was about those rows of long spikes you see on buildings and CCTV cameras, that are designed to stop birds perching. The story on at breakfast this week - you might have seen it too - was about Westminster City Council having mounted those spikes on the branches of a tree. It’s in a public park, where pigeon droppings are apparently causing a hygiene problem, and stopping a bench from being used. You can see from the pictures, it’s a really big tree, it might be an oak tree, with long spread-out branches, so the spikes are really obvious.

And I saw the picture of this and I thought, “that just looks wrong.” Never mind the arguments about pest control - whether it’s right or not to put spikes in a tree to stop birds from perching in it - you have to admit that it does just look wrong.

So that intrigued me. What’s that called, is there a name for that, the feeling and the judgement, when “that just looks wrong?” I don’t know. So I googled the phrase “that just looks wrong.” I didn’t find anything that I can share in this format, so then instead I googled, “bird spikes in a tree” - and I am able to share some of those findings.

One important fact is that this has happened before: in Bristol, in 2017. Private residents put bird control spikes in the branches of a tree over a private road, because the bird droppings were damaging the paintwork on their nice cars. With the Bristol 2017 case, there was coverage in serious media outlets: the Opinion section of the Guardian, as well as on DevonLive.com. Why Devon Live, you might be wondering. Well it’s because “the king of the pigeon spike” is a man from Devon. That name for him - a nom de plume, perhaps? - could be a flighty one-off on devonlive.com or perhaps it’s successfully landed. In any case, David Jones, from Devon, of Jones and Son Pest Control Supplies Ltd., is the inventor, patent-holder, manufacturer and global supplier of Defender Bird Spikes. You can get steel ones, or plastic ones - they’re cheaper - roof ridge solutions, there’s a chimney pot product, there’s the standard pigeon-focused spike, also starling - and I’ll read you something, from his website, about gulls:

“Defender® Seagull Spikes are a specialist product designed with the larger bird in mind. The gull spike has extra-long 304 grade stainless steel pins which cater for the longer legged bird.”

“Cater” is a strange word to have used.

So anyway, David Jones, King of the Pigeon Spike, came to the defence of his customers and said basically that if it weren’t for his bird spikes, people just hire Rentokil to shoot the pigeons, that the birds can just fly off somewhere else, and that spikes are the humane option. His website says that anti-roosting spikes are the only pigeon control product that is recommended by the RSPB and also by PiCAS International - PiCAS, that’s the Pigeon Control Advisory Service.

Since after all this is all coming from the King of the Pigeon Spike, for obvious reasons it’s best to scrutinise these assertions about the advantages and disadvantages of different deterrents, of different approaches to what I’ve learned we can call, “roost modification.”

I’ve read the wikipedia page for “Bird Control Spike” - and made some notes:

  • The page says, “Birds that attempt to alight on spike-protected surfaces receive a light prick from one or more of the spikes, which is uncomfortable but generally not harmful.” That sentence is lacking any citation - but to be fair, judging whether or not the prick you’ve received is light or not is pretty subjective, so it must be difficult to collect data on that one.
  • Bird control spikes are also used on squirrels, raccoons, opossums and snakes to stop them crossing or climbing something.
  • The term guano isn’t just for bats. You can use it for seabirds too.
  • There’s a special word for when a bird stops just to have a sit down. If it lands and perches, and it’s not nesting, roosting or eating, if it’s just chillin, that’s actually called loafing.
  • Like me, you’ll have noticed the word opossum, and wondered whether it means the same as the word possum. It does. They both refer to the Virginia opossum. Possum is the usual term, and opossum is more often used in a scientific context. You can actually ignore the o when you see opossum written, and pronounce it simply as possum.

Have a good weekend