The overengineered solution to my pigeon problem (2022)
maxnagy.com86 points by cyb0rg0 8 days ago
86 points by cyb0rg0 8 days ago
We have a pigeon on our balcony. We picked him when he was only a week old and now he lives with us. Our balcony is isolated from the street, so every morning we open a window there so Theodor (his name; although we're not sure, maybe he is she), so Theodor can go out and fly. In the evening he returns; sometimes he gets stuck somewhere due to rain (they do not fly in the rain) until dark (they do not fly in the dark either) and returns in the morning. We worry a little when this happens.
He is not strictly a pet, we try not to turn him into one and hope he will find a spouse in the spring. In the meantime we'll build him a small house that may serve as a nest if he is so inclined. We've read a few books about them and joined a chat of people who keep pigeons, en masse or just adopt a pigeon who needs it.
We do not do that often but about once a week we catch him and sprinkle with a dust against parasites. Pigeons are very pleasant to touch. The feathers have a silky feeling and they are warm, warmer than people.
There are a lot of excrements, of course. We covered the balcony with cardboard to protect and wear a dedicated pair of slippers. Yet we see these little piles with satisfaction because they mean that Theodor eats well and is healthy. By the way it must be a good fertilizer; old books say it was a source of income for the pigeon keeper.
So maybe you can make friends with pigeons instead of shooting them. The balcony is too small anyway (see "The pattern language"). Give them a bath (they love to bath), make them a feeder. (You can strategically position it so that excrements will mostly fall outside.) They are very lovely creatures.
> Pigeons are very pleasant to touch. The feathers have a silky feeling and they are warm, warmer than people.
My first language is not English, so I learned this late: pigeons are perceived as dirty birds due to its presence in urban environments, but they are the same species of doves which is perceived as clean. In my first language they are just called "pigeon" and "white pigeon".
In English there is also the name "rock dove" for pigeons (but I think technically rock doves are the wild ancestors of both white doves and city pigeons).
Huh, I wonder if this is an universal thing because over here in western europe i dont mind pigeons just flying around
Correct! Keep it up and soon you will have baby pigeons, several times a year until you run out of names and emotional capacity to worry about them all. The babies are kind of terrifying-looking but they fledge in a month or so. Sometimes pigeons take baths together with their pigeon spouses and they wash each other by splashing, which is cute. A small pigeon nestling in your cupped hands in winter is marvellously warm. They are domesticated animals, of course, but when we all stopped putting their numerous babies into pies we stopped being friendly to them too, and now they're all feral. Is that a better deal for the pigeons? I doubt they worry about it either way.
Charles Darwin was a 'pigeon fancier' (not as dodgy as it sounds), so you are in good company.
Once in the Netherlands I saw the simplest solution to pigeons: they stretched a fishing line an inch or two over the balcony railing, so when pigeons would try to land they’d land on the fishing line and be off balance, flying away to a more stable place.
Seems it worked because the balcony was spotless. I’ve seen similar on European churches.
Hey, author here — thanks for posting it again!
As of 2025 the pigeons are back and version 2 with aiming and a microphone array for target acquisition is still work-in-progress. I’m heading to bed now, but I’ll happily answer any questions tomorrow.
I am using a raspberry pi and a two axis turret with a pump and reservoir from a car windshield sprayer. right now it's just using differences in pixels to detect movement, by it it's keeping the balcony pigeon free! (a few false positives when a bumble bee flies too close to the camera though) I also have a yolo model version but haven't implemented it yet !
Cool! Do you have the STLs of the turret online somewhere?
My setup also had its occasional false positives but that’s not a problem if all you do is spray a bit of water around. I also looked into yolo, but I couldn’t find any good datasets of pigeons. Nowadays that’s no problem anymore as you can just use models like meta’s segment anything that do zero-shot bounding boxes… if you have the GPU to run it.
The introduction of GPT 4o probably gives you a much simpler path to identifying the location of pigeons right? Is that something you have looked into?
Not yet, but I used VLMs to read out water meters with mixed results. It is definitely the easiest approach to prototype. For my balcony, all vision based approaches are limited by viewing angles that don’t expose any neighbors.
But even with an llm backbone you’d still need some setup to detect when to query the llm. And then you already have a low-false-negative pigeon detector that may be sufficient for your use case.
As an aside, pigeons are deeply misunderstood. Here's a very nice article about it: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20240620-why-do-people-pe...
From the article: "One study found that, between 1941 and 2004, there were just 207 reports of pathogens transmitted from pigeons to humans – anywhere in the world. In all, there were 13 recorded deaths. The true number may be higher, but it would have to be off by several orders of magnitude to compete with the scale of infections from other domesticated animals – particularly some of those with more favourable reputations."
I occasionally (2x per week per location) feed a group of pigeons both in my apartment building's garage as well as my grocery store's open parking lot. They love sunflower seed kernels (unsalted since salt can be really bad for them) which has led to me hoarding sunflower seeds every time I go food shopping. They now recognize my car and swoop in as soon as I drive up to a parking spot (which is not consistent at the grocery store). Hopefully, one day I'll convince myself to stop/slow working and dedicate my free time to studying animal communication and behavior with some ML involved.
Noble outlook, probably nicer animals than we give them credit, but it's a bit harder to be charitable when they are shitting all over your balcony.
Feeding pigeons is a bad thing. For one the pigeons are not starving and you are over feeding them. The other issue is that you are training them to depend up humans for food. You are also aiding in creating unnaturally large pigeon populations since they are overfed.
Many places it is illegal to feed the birds. Media has created this stupid meme where people think it’s a hobby to over feed birds in cities.
I don't think feeding pigeons is objectively a bad thing. While I live in a highly urban area and don't doubt they get food, a couple of additional sessions of seeds per week is not going to make them dependent or obese. I generally confirm I am doing something reasonably appropriate by asking my local bird sanctuary.
I don't follow social media at all so not sure if there's a trend going on about feeding birds. A few times someone has shown me clearly fake (i.e. spliced together) videos of animals being "rescued" and living with families. They do make me angry because they are clearly made for views.
As always there’s someone on the internet a step beyond. Meet the pussy wetter: https://pussywetter.com/
I really only wanted to see funny videos of pigeons being squirted but nothing...
There's a cat in our neighborhood that shits on our back porches multiple times a day (I have no idea how this is possible, maybe it means the cat will die soon!), and I finally got a huge industrial fan and hooked it up to a motion sensor. Mischief managed.
Maybe a lasting solution would be a convenient, dedicated resting rod laced with a little ceasium-137. You know, so they would be willingly placing their gonads on a gamma emitter. I'd say you likely sterilize most, with only a small chance of creating a supermutant nemesis. You could also add some phosphor to attract mosquitos at night.. and sterilize them, too.
Solution: Cut food supply through humans trash. Don’t allow people to drop food on the ground in city center or elsewhere. And make life for some natural predators comfortable, like crows.
When I first saw how two crows shared a pigeon I was impressed.
Let’s solve the problem with ingenuity, not brutality.
Brutality is lazy. Dealing with animal overpopulation by introducing carnage. I know nature is indifferent but Homo sapiens should not be.
Clearly you don't live near trains that carry grain. They leak corn all over and are basically a breeding ground for pigeons.
It’s funny when engineers accidentally create/recreate weapons of war to scratch an itch. Like when Mark Rober et al tried to do an egg drop from space only to realize they were essentially creating precision-guided missiles.
"Are you sick of piles of owls constantly blocking your driveway? Well then you gotta get Owl Trowel!"
Our solution: feed the pigeons in a separate place where they congregate in wait. And it works.
previously:
May 2022, 103 comments - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31377985
I started a project this year similar to this with rats. It’s now two axis with tracking and a stereo camera with depth detection. The amount of hours I’ve spent on it is astounding but I’ve learned a lot!
Also, ended up swapping the Pi I started with to a jetson.
In my experience, crows seem to be quite an effective natural deterrent.
You can make friends with crows.
They seem to really like peanuts and, if you offer them shell included, it's a somewhat selective package tailored to them (although great tits try, you may bribe them with sunflower seeds in selective feeders). I read reports of people sometimes receiving gifts from befriended crows in return, too, so it's possible to form complex relationships. Anyway, the downside is their beautiful singing voice... Magpies are a little less noisy, but they are very shy. Crows also seem to attack birds of prey, so you may not get blessed by the occasional falcon or hawk sighting anymore, if a murder of crows protects your balcony.
Downside is they're intelligent adversaries who won't permit you an out, once they've classified you as a food source. Mine have surrounded my apartment and tap on the windows from every angle. There's no place to hide. I'm not even allowed to sleep in late.
I hang up a flag on my balcony and it has worked for me.
How does this work with a fixed gun? Perhaps its not a narrow jet as I was assuming. Is a broad cone or mist spray sufficient?
Cats also don't work. The pigeons eventually kill them by pretending not to notice then flying away at the last moment while the cat is in mid air. The cat then plunges n stories down again and again.
I don't think the pigeons will attack your network any time soon in the foreseeable future.
I'm very disappointed there is no video of this weapon in action.
A fun expansion would be to play a soft sound before shooting for familiar customers.
I feed pigeons on my balcony. They also like bird baths.
using opencv for image diffs is common quick hack, but shadows will ruin this (bright sun all of a sudden), not to mention nonpigeons haha! hate to say it but yolo/ssd work good for this:
The only thing that seemed to work for me was putting a thread across the railing where they used to land. I glued some cheap hooks to the wall either side of the railing and ran a thread over and back.
I’m not sure why it worked. They either can see the thread and get put off, or they don’t see it and freak out when they land on it. I’ve tried both black and white thread and both seem effective. It did snap once probably due to a pigeon being caught out but that’s not a problem.
It doesn’t getin my way either as the thread is loose enough for me to rest my arm on the handrail without it breaking.
My balcony has been crap free for about a year now and it cost like £2 to do.
A loud bang works and you don't have to aim
I shoot them with a "pea shooter", a cardboard pipe with a balloon attached to one end, loaded with dry lentils or rice. Stretching/charging and releasing the balloon makes a loud, directed thump noise, but by itself it's quickly ignored by pigeons. They need to be actually hit by the load to care. (BTW I can confirm, although quite violent, pigeons seemingly don't readily learn from this experience... They are really fucking stupid.)
They are adapted to city noise, honking, construction sites... Unless you use flash powder charges (like they do at airports), noise won't scare them reliably. And your neighbors, dogs and the cool birds won't be happy about frequent reality shattering explosions. The stuff they use at airports got enough power to blow off hands.
> They need to be actually hit by the load to care. (BTW I can confirm, > although quite violent, pigeons seemingly don't readily learn from > this experience... They are really fucking stupid.)
That doesn't sound stupid to me. Rather it sounds like they're willing to put with a lot of annoyance in order to get food.
It's not about the food. It's about a place to rest their fat bodies. Lacking the agility of every other bird, they prefer strictly horizontal branches of a certain diameter. There is plenty of other trees around. They could just realize the particular ones in front of my window mean getting shot with stuff. Honestly, they could alternatively just contain themselves and not literally shit my plants kaputt. We could coexist.
Do you commonly see other birds disfigured because they kept ignoring deterrents? No?! That's because pigeons are fucking stupid.
The neighbours probably won’t approve
Then you have to imagine another device to deal with the neighbours.
I like the way you think. If the loud bang takes care of the pigeons, the water gun is available.
TL;DR: I built a wifi-equipped water gun to shoot the pigeons on my balcony, controlled over the internet by a python script running openCV reading the camera image of my old iPhone.