Falcons as Bird Control

S

SifuPhil

R.I.P. With Us In Spirit Only
Location
Pennsylvania, USA
I have the TV going in the background as usual this morning, right now it's Jack Hanna's Wild Kingdom. They just had a piece about a guy who was hired by an Air Force base to control the bird flocks with his trained falcon.

It was so cool - the falcon wasn't even trying to kill the birds, she just scattered them by zipping around at up to 200MPH and showing off her razor-sharp beak.

Two things came to mind - the ad in the papers a while back looking for a bird-control person at an airport for $80k a year, and the town with the bat problem in Australia. Both might be solved with falconry ...
 
Ummmm, fruit bats are almost the size of house cats with wingspans over a meter and they ain't afraid of no falcon. Maybe a Wedge Tailed Eagle would make them nervous but they're a bit harder to handle than falcons.

Plus falcons are no good in the dark and the bats hang wrapped up in their wings sound asleep all day and wouldn't know if a fighter plane was after them let alone a falcon. Falcons only work on other birds.

I've seen the crows and magpies engaging in aerial warfare with the bats in Burdekin park. We could watch it from the pub across the street. Never saw them bring down a single bat. The bats would fly out at sunset and the birds would pretend they'd won and roost in the trees for the night. Poor trees never got a break.
 
The bird may have been a Merlin.
This bird as been clocked at well over two hundred miles per hour. It has special thick hairs in its nostrils to slow the air down so that it can breath at those speeds.
A Falcon is slow in comparison.
 

There are stories and videos of falcons taking down geese much larger than themselves, so I wouldn't think it's a matter of size. The nocturnal nature of the bats could be a problem, but couldn't you just release the falcons at dusk? They'd still get in plenty of kills, I would think.

... or fit them with night-vision goggles!

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littleowl said:
The bird may have been a Merlin.
This bird as been clocked at well over two hundred miles per hour. It has special thick hairs in its nostrils to slow the air down so that it can breath at those speeds.
A Falcon is slow in comparison.
Click to expand...

Thanks for that, LO - didn't know that!

Although, from the Fish and Wildlife Service site -

In level flight, the normal speed for peregrines is about 40 to 55 miles per hour. In a stoop (dive) peregrine falcons can attain speeds in excess of 200 miles per hour as they attack their prey.
Click to expand...
 
The principle reason Falcons are used at airports is to frighten other birds away. But they wouldn't frighten 2-3 thousand bats hanging in trees sound asleep.
(They gave up counting at 2000 in Singleton's park.)

How many cat sized bats could one falcon carry off? It would take it a week to eat one. You'd need an awful lot of falcons before the bats realized their ranks were thinning.
Also geese don't have teeth, not ours anyway. :rolleyes: Unlike those tiny bats in the video, fruit bats (Flying Foxes) have canines like Dobermans. The Falcon, if it could pull the bat out of the tree while it was hanging on with longer stronger talons than the falcon has, would find himself being eaten by his prey on the way home with it.

You really don't want to mess with those things. It gives me the creeps to see earth mother types with the filthy things hanging on their jackets to prove they're 'saving' the wildlife. Pity more of them didn't get fanged to wake them up. Many of them (the bats) carry the Lyssa virus, related to rabies, and only a scratch, not a bite, from one proved fatal to a boy in Queensland. Other fatalities have been from catching it from horses which the bats infect through their urine on the horses feed, or even pastures. They really have no saving graces these things.

Bats are pretty stupid, they don't get scared unless something is actually hurting them so they would take little or no notice of a falcon dive-bombing their neighbours. They have few natural enemies, mainly just snakes. (or in the good ole days, farmers with shotguns)

Starvation was the controlling factor of their numbers but since we've presented them with free food crops there are millions more here now than there ever was and idiots are 'protecting' them!

The big problem with the Singleton flock is that they are a mix of normal 'turn a blind eye to knocking them off' ordinary fruit bats plus a sprinkling of the sacrosanct, 'endangered' Grey Headed bats which none may even think bad thoughts about. I defy anyone to tell the bloody difference from 3 feet away let alone when they're flying around but apparently a bit of grey fur among the vermin renders everyone powerless to do anything about them. If they're alike enough to flock together then they may as well be the same species but my opinion isn't 'science' so around it all goes.

Of course that Falcon would have to be trained not to frighten any Grey Headed bats too..... aaaaaaghhhh.

I'm off to bed to dream of bats and shotguns... night all.:eek:fftobed:
 
I guess then the only solution is to issue every citizen with a flame-thrower, and damn the endangered species ... I know if I was being chased ala The Birds I wouldn't care WHAT species they were.

flamethrower.png
 
Falcons_Lions_Football.JPEG3_2.JPG
 
Couldn`t they use those high pitch noises , wouldn`t that be powerful enough to drive those bats away?
we have a few around here too when the gum tree blossoms are out their favourite food I believe and the
destruction they do to the gum blossoms you would think it was snowing underneath.. there would have to be
something to get rid of them?.. a friend of ours has put two of those electronic high pitch noise deterrants in his back yard to
get rid of pigeons, sea gulls and also the noisy miners , plus the dogs and cats who come in and it worked.. we can`t hear it
but the animals and birds sure do ..he is so pleased at the moment any way..
 
There are a lot of things that work Rainee, like (shhhhh) throwing short lengths of barbed wire into the fruit trees and shredding the wings of the b*s for instance but that's kind of frowned upon by activists and bleeding hearts who don't have to battle them for a living.

The high pitch option I'm not sure about being tried in Singo but they probably couldn't because it might upset the 'Grey Headed' bats among them and they are a super protected species.
 
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