I shoot them with a "pea shooter", a cardboard pipe with a balloon attached to one end, loaded with dry lentils or rice. Stretching/charging and releasing the balloon makes a loud, directed thump noise, but by itself it's quickly ignored by pigeons. They need to be actually hit by the load to care. (BTW I can confirm, although quite violent, pigeons seemingly don't readily learn from this experience... They are really fucking stupid.)
They are adapted to city noise, honking, construction sites... Unless you use flash powder charges (like they do at airports), noise won't scare them reliably. And your neighbors, dogs and the cool birds won't be happy about frequent reality shattering explosions. The stuff they use at airports got enough power to blow off hands.
> They need to be actually hit by the load to care. (BTW I can confirm,
> although quite violent, pigeons seemingly don't readily learn from
> this experience... They are really fucking stupid.)
That doesn't sound stupid to me. Rather it sounds like they're willing
to put with a lot of annoyance in order to get food.
It's not about the food. It's about a place to rest their fat bodies. Lacking the agility of every other bird, they prefer strictly horizontal branches of a certain diameter. There is plenty of other trees around. They could just realize the particular ones in front of my window mean getting shot with stuff. Honestly, they could alternatively just contain themselves and not literally shit my plants kaputt. We could coexist.
Do you commonly see other birds disfigured because they kept ignoring deterrents? No?! That's because pigeons are fucking stupid.
