I live in a hostel with my room facing a veritable jungle. We have all sorts of birds flapping around the place…everyday mynahs to the rarer woodpeckers to some absolutely gorgeous blue and yellow things. There’s really a lot of birds.
The clothesline on which I hang my laundry to dry faces this forested area. Invariably, the aluminium rod has bird droppings over it, and I end up having to clean it up before I can hang out my clothes. Over time, however, I have noticed one thing. There is never a single bit of bird poop on my dry clothes. Not ever.
Why is this? Not that I’m complaining, but what’s so unappealing about my clothes that the birds refuse to poop on them?
(I apologise in advance for the utterly mundane and pointless nature of this question. I just felt this incredible need to know why.)
Growing up my mother always hung out the clothes to dry. (Well, in spring, summer and autumn.) We always had lots of birds in the backyard and they often sat on the clothesline when there were clothes hanging, and not.
We never had any bird poop on the clean clothes.
For a few years, a neighbor reared an orphan crow. “Fred” used to visit all the time, make an awful racket, evewn steal the clothespins. But he never pooped on the clothes.
Perhaps it’s the clothes detergent you use. Maybe it has a chemical or additive that keeps the birds away. (Then again, as in our case, it made no difference.)
Don’t birds usually sit on that clothesline when they’re pooping on it? I think that’s the usual scene. Maybe they don’t like sitting on it when they can’t wrap their claws around it all the way. Or maybe the flapping of the clothes in the breeze unnerves them and they’d just rather sit elsewhere.
I think emilyforce has it. The birds are happy to sit (and poop) on the stable aluminum rod. The clothes, though, may be more difficult to get a good grip on, or may be too unstable. Birds won’t perch (and hence poop) on them.
Could it be, that the flapping clothes scare the birds away? Even if they land, they probably don’t stay very long because the line would move in a totally different way, than when it was sans-clothes
