Bird Free ‘fire gel’ in the news

When a local Sussex newspaper hit the newsstands on 1 April this year with the front page headline ‘Fake fire to scare off town pigeons’ some locals though the story was an April Fool’s hoax.  How could a yellow goo resembling lemon curd appear to birds as fire?  Soon after, the BBC and the national press picked up on the story, dubbing the goo ‘fire gel’.

This flurry of media attention centred around an otherwise-unremarkable public car park in Horsham, West Sussex.  Pigeons had been nesting and roosting overnight and causing a horrible mess inside the car park for many years.  Car park customers were complaining.

Council officers were at a bit of a loss as to how to get rid of the pigeons because traditional bird-proofing methods were not viable at the site, so when JJBio suggested its patented Bird Free bird deterrent as a solution the Council decided to give it a try.

In early March 2011, after a thorough clean-up, Bird Free was applied to all the pipes and ledges inside the entrance to Blackhorse Way car park in Horsham.  All the pigeons that had been living there promptly left and have not returned to the car park since.

After monitoring the site for two weeks, Horsham District Council’s senior pest control officer declared himself “astonished at the results”.  He went on to say “For pigeons to completely desert a habitat they had been frequenting for years flies in the face of all the knowledge of pigeons and their roosting habits I have gained over 27 years in pest control.”

It was, by now, apparent that far from being the subject of an April Fool’s joke, Bird Free was a valuable innovation that could help protect man’s urban environment from the depredations of pigeons and other nuisance birds.

As a result of all this publicity, JJBio was inundated with enquiries from owners and managers of commercial properties throughout the UK. Among these were household names, several of whom have already installed Bird Free at their premises.

Bird Free has since received further nationwide coverage in the Sunday Times, which, on 7 August 2011, reported on the installation of Bird Free at the 180-year-old Covent Garden Market in central London (please see case studies).

For press enquiries please call 0207 359 9988 or email press@bird-free.com