Recently I have noticed a bird which is tethered by wire or fishing line to a tall, apparently tapered, pole on the roof of a shop. Sorry the picture is not good:
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It looks as if it might be made of very thin metal or plastic sheet. At a glance it has similar dimensions to a red kite and, with a very quick look in poor light, that is what it could be. When there is no wind it hangs miserably down just above the roof looking like the cut-out it is. In a decent breeze it flies around a lot and looks more like a real bird.
They are bird scarers to keep other birds like pigeons away from newly seeded cricket pitches and brassicas. They are quite amusing and do appear to hover fly stall stoop in quite a convincing way in the wind.
They are also sold in great numbers at motorhome and caravan shows, originally people bought them to stick next to their motorhome/caravan, so they could find it again in a sea of similar looking vehicles at showground campsites, but then everyone had that idea and it no longer works unless you buy one of the new shapes released at that show (fish, dogs, cats, witches and so on)
I recall a few years ago someone had his duck shaped flag/kite thing on the
10 meter pole set up in his garden, a passing old dear saw it and called the police and RSPCA about a duck cruelly tied to a pole in someones garden,
When they arrived and pointed out it was a flag type thing, she went on the defensive, bitching about how such things should be illegal, how inhumane, what kind of deranged bird hater would fly a flag that looks like a duck teathered to a flag pole and so on.
The paper then went on to say how they are used by caravaners and why, even listing a place to order them from, a few weeks later most gardens on that estate had various birds 'tethered to a pole' in gardens.
But i must admit i never thought of them for scaring the flying shit machines away, probably because i was so used to their original use from 10 years ago (along with putting a flashing coloured led on the top of the pole so you could find your van after staggering out of the beer tent at midnight... 'head for the blue flashing light dear' he says, as she looks on a field with about 300 blue flashing lights :)
There was an over sensitive bint on the regional news* around here a couple of months ago saying could never travel by train again through Reading station,she had witnessed the Falconer and his bird brought in by Network Rail dealing with a pigeon and the death traumatised her. Hope she remembers when traveling by coach not to sit near the front in case a bird gets splatted on the Windscreen. Such oversensitive people are a nuisance ,god knows how they reach adulthood. Probably be the first to moan about an unreliable train service.
*FSVO of regional now that regions encompass 3 or 4 counties.
They tend to bounce off in a cloud of feathers. She'd have a hard time up here, if there isn't something fairly freshly dead on the road every 1/4 mile or so, something is wrong. Normally rabbits or pheasants, occasional hedge hog. The carcases don't last long, couple of days at most.
Strangest animal collision I witnessed was from a front seat on the top deck of a double decker on an excursion using a road not normally traversed by buses at all. In a scene that could have been from a cartoon I can still see the squirrel on a low branch looking at the approaching bus with an almost quizzical look "what the heck is this" just before the window hit it where upon it slid down the glass splayed out. Run under rather than run over. The bus was going fairly slow due to the trees so it may have survived its descent.
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