57. Pigeons, plugs, and pie pans

Gus’s barn is now a pigeon exclusion zone.  Pigeons have long been numerous and ubiquitous above the stalls and arena in that barn, but we finally reached our limit of tolerance.  The makeshift ceiling over the little tack room has helped protect the saddles and bridles, but everywhere else the pigeon poop has been prodigious bordering on the epic.  The audience chairs in the arena have been covered in it, and ditto for the light switch, the entry gate, the stack of miniature traffic cones, the fetching toys, etc., etc.  In the stabling half of the barn, the residents have been shat upon, their water buckets fouled, their feed buckets caked, and their neatly folded blankets and flymasks besmirched.  Sandy was draping old towels over everybody’s feed buckets between meals, but the towels became stiff with dried excrement every couple of days.  

The cooing of easily 30 or 40 pigeons has rarely bothered me, but their frequent and  sudden flights in and out of the barn can be unnerving to horses and riders.  I think the final straw for Sandy was seeing how much grain the pigeons were  stealing from the coop of her very nice chickens while they were outside dutifully eating up bugs all over the property.  Which includes two disused barns that would make Perfectly Fine alternative homes for the pigeons to make their very own.

So, after extensive online and word-of-mouth research, Sandy has compiled an arsenal of pigeon assault weapons:  a SuperSoaker pump-action squirt gun, a toy rifle that fires plastic-foam Nerf bullets, and a big, long-handled net.  All humans who see a pigeon are deputized to grab a water or Nerf gun and let fly (and enjoined to gather up the spent Nerf bullets and return them to their ammo box for reloading).  To support her artillery and fusilier power, she became a corps of engineers, climbing up and hanging an aluminum-foil pie pan on a string to dangle in the center of each and every little window between the arena and the stable.  She tightly closes the big arena doors every night.  She has plastic owls posted around the building full-time.
 

In the face of this relentless onslaught, the pigeon population has plummeted.  There’s still a nest over Gus’s stall and a few others way high in the arena rafters, beyond the range of water hose or foam bullets.  But the barn is appreciably less shitted up these days.  Rows of pigeons now bide their time on the power lines outside, watching for a chance to retake their territory.  But our warrior spirits are steeled to keep up the good fight, never let down our guard, and beat back the invaders.  We hope the onset of winter will dampen their resolve and drive them at last to seek shelter elsewhere.

Victory won’t be declared until there are no more than a couple of pigeons resident in our barn.  And we fully expect to re-up and resume hostilities in the spring.