3 Reasons Why You Shouldn’t Kill Pigeons

When it comes to pigeons, relocation is the only solution, but it's not the kind of relocation that you can do with a couple of traps and a short car journey. With an average daily mileage of around seven to eight hundred in some cases, there's no way that you could possibly drive far enough away to release this bird so that it didn't fly back. That's even more so the case when you bear in mind that the longest journey ever travelled by this bird for migratory purposes has been recorded at over seven thousand miles ...

Definitely much too far for you to travel.

For many, removing the possibility of humane trap-and-release methods usually results in a kill approach, but this is, once again, a solution that really doesn't work for pigeons.

Reason number 1: Pigeons breed faster when you cull them.

To start with, when you cull a great number of the pigeon population, it will simply fight back. It will breed faster, all throughout the year, popping out more eggs after more eggs, just to try and put the numbers right again. If you wanted to deal with the pigeon population in this way, you would most certainly need to cull the entire flock. Taking out just one or two of the birds would leave the rest to breed at a much faster rate than they were before. This takes your problem right to where it was before, and perhaps even bigger depending on how zealously the pigeons repopulated.

Here's a bit of fun trivia for you: the rat is another animal that responds to population culling by reproducing faster. There are a lot of similarities between rats and pigeons, and the fact that they can breed and reproduce all year round is definitely one of them. Speeding that process up is the second.

Reason number 2: There's no practical method.

How do you think you could cull an entire flock of a couple of hundred pigeons in one go? Poison? Fumigant? Big trap so that you can shoot or drown the birds afterwards?

We've heard everything from DIY poison remedies to drowning large sackfuls of birds at a time. As you can probably imagine, none of these methods are humane. In fact, none of these methods are legal.

There isn't a registered poison for pigeons. There isn't a lethal trap that you can use, either. You would need to be a damned good shot if you were planning to get your firearm out to deal with the flock, and again, this probably isn't going to be a lawful method of resolving the problem. You're going to be faced with just as many problems trying to get birds into a large enough net or bag to be able to drown them, or to destroy them in a physical-contact kind of way. And on top of all of that, you've got all of the disease threats to concern yourself with, too. There's a lot to think about. We can tell you the ending, too — you won't solve the pigeon problem by culling any of them, and you probably won't manage to kill off the entire lot. If you do, you'll have sent whatever products or concoctions you used to do it, into the big, wide world. That'll have repercussions far and wide and could, once again, land you in hot water with the boys in blue.

Reason number 3: There's no need.

As well as not being practical, there really isn't any need to kill pigeons in order to stop them from invading your backyard. you just need to make the invaded part inaccessible for them in the future. This is easily done using bird netting, wire-lines, or bird strip spikes, and the one you use should fit the space you're trying to protect.

Bird spike strips can be easily secured to TV aerials and similar structures to prevent pigeons from landing on them. You can use the same strip spikes on ledges and windowsills, too, and you also have the option of wire-lines for those spaces, as well as on top of fences or walls. Larger areas can be protected using netting. There is a method of pigeon prevention for every space around your building, and it takes the simplest of property modifications to make them work for you. One weekend of bird-proofing could leave you with a bird-free home for many years to come, and may even prevent other wild animal intruders, too.