I hardly ever see them anymore - but did they ever work, or were they just a waste of time?
Their principal job was to provide comic relief and some singing and dancing along the Yellow Brick Road.
Seriously, they were supposed to fool crows in to thinking that there was a person standing in the field who woud do something bad to the crows coming by. But crows really aren’t that stupid.
You see “scareowls” in some buildings where a fairly lifelike wooden owl is put up someplace to keep pigeons from congregating.
I argue in my book that “Scarecrow” devices did work, but that they weren’t of the floppy, man-shaped devices you see in cornfields. They were like the “Scareowls” that BobT notes.
The effectiveness of “scare -eye” balloons has been verified by careful testing, not just anecdotal information. Ronald J. Prokopy of UMass Amherst tested the effectiveness of these balloons in fruit orchards (“Fruit Notes”, Vol. 56 (20 16, Spring 1991). Michael Conover of utah State Univerrsity also tested sych devicwes.
They look like this:
http://www.biconet.com/birds/scareEye.html
Those ceramic owls and cat-head silhouettes (with marble eyes) do the same thing. I argue that such devices have been used for thousands of years – gargoyles in Medieval Europe and in Greece, Rome, and ancient Chinas. Also the oscillae of the Roman world, the protome, and so-called “Drinking-Bowl masks”.
The Romans also used figures of Priapus s scarecrows, but I strongly suspect they didn’t work very well.
Wouldn’t that be a “scarepigeon”?
Well, if you want to be really picky, I’ll call it a “Scarerockdove”
I have to say from my experience that they don’t frighten pigeons.
We had some placed near the roof of our hanger and the birds just completely ignored them, and often roosted next to them.
Prokopr reported good results on Starlings, blackbirds, and other “forest” species, but he didn’t say anything about pigeons.
There is a farmer down the road from me, who grows corn every year, on a one acre plot. About every 25 feet or so, all around the perimeter, he has a ten foot post sticking up from the ground. Hanging off the top of each post, is the dead body of a crow. I pass this plot twice a day, and I have never seen a live crow anywhere near his corn.
Hey, it works for me. If I saw a dead human hanging from a post…every 25 feet…I’d avoid that corn too.
Somewhat related anyway has to do with modern technology.
At the auto auction where I work, we have had a serious problem with birds flying over, landing on the very expansive roof , and in between flying and landing crapping all over the place------including crapping over all us workers and our “darling” used auto dealers—saints that they may possibly be.
Solution=======a rather small device mounted on the outside wall that emits bird sounds on a timer about every 15 minutes or so for about a minute.
Seem like normal bird sounds to me, altho rather loud and sounds like a sort of scared bird at least to me.
I guess it sounds like “warning!! warning!!-------get the hell out this place --like real fast” ------at least to a bird.
Anyway-----it seems to work beautifully. No birds fly around anymore. No birds seem to want to land. No more hundreds of birds sitting on the roof, just waiting to poop on everybody and his brother ------and especially on our beloved used car dealers.
Whoever designed this thing knew just what kind of scared bird sound would make birds just go away.
I hope he made bazillions of dollars.