Birds of prey are being used at a school in west Cornwall to deal with increasing attacks by seagulls.
Students at Helston Community College say the gulls are a menace and follow them around during breaks, hoping to steal their food.
Harris Hawks are being flown around the school's grounds once a week to scare the gulls away.
The school said it had tried a number of measures to try to scare off the gulls but nothing seemed to work.
Maintenance manager, Richard Coode, said: "The seagulls are quite vicious. They come down and attack and take whatever they want.
"They won't stop until they get what they want. There haven't been any bad incidents, but the kids have had some scratches from the seagulls pecking at them."
Teachers said they responded by making sure that rubbish was picked up quickly and even put fake owls on the roofs.
Student Jessica Sneddon said: "It's mainly on the field at lunchtime. If you put your food down next to you, you will get a load of them coming down attacking for the food."
The school is hopeful it may have found a solution in the form of Richy Hicks who trains and owns Harris Hawks.
Mr Hicks said: "With the amount of gulls that are here it can take up to three years to slowly move them out.
"It's moving them slowly but they are eventually going. They are getting the message."
Re: The Birds
Posted: Fri Jun 22, 2012 1:50 am
by rubato
Harris Hawks are amazing birds but they usually hunt for prey on the ground, not other birds.
They are the only raptor which hunts cooperatively, in groups. And they have one of the highest kill-to-hunt ratios of any group of cooperative hunters ( like wolves, Lions, African hunting dogs. Death from above! It's a good strategy.
Their normal range in the US is the lower Colorado River valley but some have escaped from the local falcon recovery program* so I've seen them around Elkhorn Slough.
If he wanted to get rid of the gulls in something less than a geological time span he'd use Peregrine Falcons. They knock prey out of the air at 200 mph and no gull would be anywhere in the area they were flying. Harris Hawks are probably just an irritation.
yrs,
rubato
* The Santa Cruz Predatory Research Group who brought back the Peregrine Falcon in the Western US as well as the Bald Eagle and Harris Hawk.
Re: The Birds
Posted: Sat Jun 23, 2012 3:58 pm
by rubato
This person uses Harris Hawks to rid places of pigeons. Worth checking out his site:
I was also interested as to why local raptors weren't brought in?
Found this interesting;
Birds of Prey
Falconry is an ancient and highly skilled field sport, using birds of prey to catch quarry. The use of a bird of prey in a commercial bird control operation is no different; despite what you might be told, a bird of prey cannot be trained not to kill it is a natural instinct for the bird to do so.
Birds of prey used for commercial purposes will occasionally kill the target (or other) species. (ask Norwich Council)...
A number of companies in the UK offer this service where birds of prey are flown in or around a specific building or site on a regular basis and the client is told that the resident pigeon / gull flock will move elsewhere to roost....
Just one little thought on this.... Many large Cities / Towns now suffer from Gull (and pigeon) problems, whilst at the same time many also have resident Peregrine Falcons nesting and living within the same area. I know for a fact that Bath, Chichester and Brighton all have Peregrines nesting in the same vicinity as gulls, if they can't frighten the gulls into moving, why believe a captive bird will do better?
Flying a bird of prey is now being commonly offered as a means of deterring roof-nesting gulls, yet birds of prey are not effective at scaring nesting gulls. Gulls will never be deterred by raptors during the breeding period and at any other time of the year the threat will only move the gulls on for an hour or so, necessitating regular patrols to keep the gulls away. Indeed it is not unknown for Gulls to 'gang up' and chase the falcon / hawk away.
It might make an interesting spectacle for visitors, and give the impression that the local authority is doing 'something' unless of course they catch and kill another bird, just wait for the publicity from that!
I know from personal experience that peregrine falcons are effective against pigeons: I saw one of those falcons (which have been re-introduced in the city of Chicago to nest on ledges of tall buildings) bring down and consume a pigeon literally in my own back yard. (I stood behind the kitchen window and quietly applauded.) I don't see any reason they wouldn't go after gulls as well.
Re: The Birds
Posted: Mon Jun 25, 2012 1:20 am
by loCAtek
I think it's because of the size ratio; on the Falcon Cam you can see the peregrines prefer to hunt pigeons, and will only rarely bring down seagulls, in spite of the fact that San Jose also has a large seagull population.
Further researching, shows falcons are used to 'scare' the gulls away, but they aren't actually hunting & killing. In this video, it's also pointed out that you have to send out the feathered scarecrows every day, or else the seagulls will just come back.
Are the species of natural avian predators like eagles, which do hunt gulls, on the decline in Cornwall?
Re: The Birds
Posted: Mon Jun 25, 2012 1:40 am
by Lord Jim
It's really a tribute to Hitchcock's skill as a director and film maker, that he could craft such a chilling scene with such primitive animation tools available to him....
Re: The Birds
Posted: Mon Jun 25, 2012 2:48 am
by loCAtek
He called in the best and hired a Disney animator; it was state of the art animation for it's time.
An extraordinarily complex piece of compositing (shown in the clip with inserts removed) which demonstrates Hitchcock's continuing urge to push the lackadaisical state of the art. The flapping of the birds' wings caused too much fringing for conventional blue-screen work to be utilised, and Hitchcock was forced to turn to the 'yellow screen' or 'sodium vapour process'. Only Walt Disney studios have ever been equipped for this process, and indeed only one camera has ever been rigged for it. SVP involves filming the subject against a screen lit with powerful sodium vapour lights utilising a very narrow spectrum of light. Unlike most compositing processes, SVP actually shoots two separate elements of the footage simultaneously using a beam-splitter; one reel exposed is regular photographic stock and the other an emulsion sensitive only to the sodium vapour wavelength. Very precise mattes are obtained from the latter, allowing the subject to be pulled out of the background and combined with any other in a later run through an optical printer. The fringing or 'matte line' effects are negligible compared to blue-screen work, but the very precise conditions under which the footage must be shot mitigated against its wide usage. Disney, to whom many shots in The Birds was farmed out, used the process in many films including Mary Poppins (1964), Freaky Friday (1976)and The Black Hole (1979).
Re: The Birds
Posted: Mon Jun 25, 2012 3:27 am
by Lord Jim
To me, what really makes that scene work, is the way he got so much out of the kids....
It must have taken a lot of work and patience to put that together...
The main way the terror is conveyed is through the close up reactions of the individual child actors to the attack...
That's a particularly impressive accomplishment given the fact that Hitchcock had no previous experience directing child actors.
