Visual Pigeon Deterrents — Will They Keep the Birds Away?

When it comes to repelling pigeons from your back garden or property, you have plenty of options at your disposal. In fact, you almost have too many options. There are plenty of items you can buy (and waste your money on), all promising to get rid of pigeons, but the likelihood of them working … Well, that's a different story entirely.

Pigeons are often referred to as "vermin of the sky", and there's a damn good reason for that. They are pretty much the rat that flies. They eat everything and anything, get in any space they want to, and spread a wide number of diseases, none of which you would want to INVITE into your home. If you have pigeons living on your land, that's exactly what you ARE doing.

Visual pigeon deterrents come in many forms, and are designed to visually frighten the pigeon. A decoy owl or hawk, for example, could scare a pigeon because they are pigeon predators. The same can be said for animals on the ground, such as foxes, snakes or coyotes. Plastic dummies and decoys have been used for many years, in homes and gardens all around the world, to deter various wild critters. The fact that those wild critters are still posing a problem to residential and commercial properties should say something about their effectiveness … They simply don't work. As soon as the pigeon realises that the decoy or dummy doesn't move or smell like the predator they're pretending to be, they'll just ignore it.

Scare tape is another pigeon repellent that you could try out in your back garden, a bit like regular adhesive tape, but with a foil/reflective side. This reflective side catches the light of the sun and directs it all over the place, displacing the birds. They don't like the strobe light effect it brings.

Scare tape can be bought for next to nothing online, and can effectively work at repelling birds from your back garden. Unfortunately, if you're trying to attract small birds and repel big birds, scare tape for birds won't be the best approach. It'll simply scare most or all of the birds away. There have also been cases where the pigeons aren't affected in the slightest by the scare tape. If you're using repellents or deterrents like this one, always have a contingency plan.

Sometimes the ‘old' ways are the best ways … The scarecrow is still used as a common method of bird removal and repellent to this day, despite being one of the oldest and most primitive of methods. With arms and legs that move in the breeze, and perhaps hair, too, the scarecrow might just be what your garden needs to protect it from invading pigeons!

With strobe lights, laser beams, and all sorts of weird and wonderful visual-based repellents for pigeons, there's plenty that you could spend your money on. What you need to work out, however, is whether or not those items are worth it. If you spend $400 on repellents over a period of weeks or months, and you still haven't cleared up the waste or repaired the damage, it'll probably have been cheaper to call in a professional wildlife removal company to remove the pigeons on your behalf.