Tuesday, March 10, 2015

Feeling Owlish

My balcony. Terrifying to pigeons. Hahahaha.
It's almost spring. Love is in the air.

Sunday I removed the stalagmites of pigeon poop from three years ago. If you visit here often, you know I love birds, but I do not love pigeons pooping all over my balcony. This spring, I'm  waging war, not love--or so I tell myself. There was a dove sitting on the couch out there this morning and I'm clearly insane because I added a third owl. Two plastic owls weren't doing the trick, so now there are three plastic owls. Snakes, my aunt told me on the phone earlier, get some rubber snakes. Rubber snakes, plastic owls. Pretty soon I won't want to go out there.

There''s also an owl in the palm tree below my balcony.
I have an owl suspended above my front door too. It startles me sometimes when I catch a glimpse of it from my upstairs hallway.

The swallows will begin to arrive any day now. The best solution for that is to take off the window screen and spend a lot of time upstairs by the window where they like to nest. I stalk them with a spray bottle. Eventually they give up, but it's a full time job for a couple of days.

Uh-oh. I gotta go. I hear pigeons cooing.

4 comments:

Ms. Moon said...

I just tried to clean a lot of chicken poop off my porches. I don't think owls would work for them. Besides that, I am charmed watching them walk across the porch, sticking their beaks in the ferns.
But I understand why you would not want the pigeons using your balcony as their own private restroom.
Bird poop is strange and yucky.

Vesuvius At Home said...

When I was a little girl we had pigeons living under our eaves. I thought it was charming and romantic, but obviously I never had to clean up their poop. Don't get me started on my mother-in-law's former attic full of guano.

Elizabeth said...

The image of you with a spray bottle, your plastic owls, your plastic snakes -- well -- I'm a tad worried.

Bella Rum said...

I used to sit by the upstairs office window with a water bottle and squirt it at the squirrels. I had a bird feeder there, hanging from the tree, and they kept eating all the food. I like birds, too, but not their poop. The big ones are the worst offenders.