RESIDENTIAL AND COMMERCIAL BIRD CONTROL
Birds often become a nuisance for Seattle residential and commercial properties alike.
Starlings
The most common bird pest that causes issues for our residential customers are starlings. Starlings have bright yellow bills in the summer with a black, iridescent, spot coloring and like to nest in attics through soffit holes (bird block holes). The nests that they build and will use year after year if allowed are big, smelly, toxic, and mite-ridden.
Northern Flicker Woodpeckers
Northern Flicker Woodpeckers, indigenous to the Pacific Northwest and protected, cause the most structural damage to residential homes if measures are not taken to deter them at early onset.
Swallows
Swallows create mud-saliva cup nests at higher areas along the soffit and do acrobatic dive bomb flights around their nests to protect their eggs or hatchlings.
Chimney Swifts
Chimney (Vaux) Swifts like to nest inside a chimney area because they do not need any horizontal lift in order to achieve flight. Their nest is cup-shaped and they can be seen at dusk swooping over the tall chimney. They migrate to South America during the fall months where they stay until the spring migration back to the Pacific Northwest.
What's the Best Way to Keep Birds Away?
Several options are available to mitigate bird issues. For residential structures, the focus is more on exclusion and prevention. The most popular items are to seal off the entry and roosting points while installing intimidation and deterrent products. Just like with people, birds have their own personalities and tolerances. Some are more persistent than others and some scare easily. Deterrents include scare devices such as balloons, spikes, flashers, or mylar strips and exclusion work have proven to be great ways of resolving the issue and in a cost-effective way. For commercial locations where buildings can be vast, we may suggest different options due to the higher concentration of bird populations. In these cases, we may resort to installing netting, bird spikes, or optical gel. In particular, with pigeons, we can provide trapping services to remove the current population on the property and then install devices to prevent future incursion. Devices emit a non-toxic irritant into the air periodically so that when birds are flying around the area and inhale the solution, it discourages the birds from wanting to be in the area.
Here are a few product descriptions of things that are commonly used for bird control: