Gull Wars - 2

Stage one of our fight against the gulls - see earlier post here - was to buy an owl, strongly recommended on certain websites as a sure-fire way to rid a chimney of gulls, pigeons and crows. Having filled it with sand we thought we would try it out by the bird bath, which the gulls have been visiting despite the fine wire stretched across it. As can be seen, the tits paid not the slightest attention to the owl and, worse, one of....

....our resident robins was quick to make friends with it.

So we brought up the big guns, in the form of Mr MacKenzie, our local roofer/chimney sweep, who came on Thursday to....

....fit a thicket of anti-gull wire spikes on the chimney and, in the process, to remove several years of accumulated filth from it, and cap it properly.  However, while he was up on the roof we asked him....

....to put the owl up there anyway - it can be seen on the flat roof above our bedroom where, hopefully, it might prevent some of the crows from doing a dance there, as they did on numerous occasions last summer, at three in the morning.

There have been no gulls on the chimney since the spikes were installed but the owl has had no effect on the jackdaws, which still use the TV aerial as a vantage point from which to survey the garden for any food which the small birds have dropped.