Originally posted November 22, 2014:  Added an addendum to the end of this story.

Power Plant Pigeons actually believe that the entire reason Power Plants were built in the first place was to provide new rent-free Pigeon roosts for Power Plant Pigeons.  Large lakes are placed alongside the Power Plant so that the pigeons can spend their days frolicking away in the immense Pigeon Bird Bath supplied by the electric company.  Fields of grain are planted throughout the power plant realm in order to provide a nutritional diet to Power Plant Pigeons.  Even men with bright yellow hardhats are supplied for pigeons to fly over and target practice their Power Plant Pigeon Poop dropping skills by aiming at the bright hardhat dots below.

One Power Plant Pigeon

I wrote about the pursuit to remove Power Plant Pigeons from the Power Plant Realm two years ago when I wrote the post “Poison Pill for Power Plant Pigeons“.  In that post I explained how we had put out live traps to capture Power Plant Pigeons.  Jody Morse taught me that it was better to persuade than to try to force the pigeons into the live traps.

After I joined the electric shop, we came up with a few other ways to rid the area of pigeons.  This was more of a personal crusade, since I spent a lot of time working on the roof of the precipitator, which was a favorite haunt of Power Plant pigeons.  I had spent a lot of time with a broom sweeping up the Power Plant Pigeon leavings only to come back a few weeks later to find the entire area redecorated with artistic renditions of Salvadore Dali paintings of melting clocks.

See the resemblance?

One day when when Bill Bennett strolled into the electric shop…. well… “Strutted” is a better word to describe Bill Bennett’s type of strolling.  Bill was a skinnier version of a skinny Bill Cosby… for those of you who have not heard me mention him before….

Bill Cosby trying to look like Bill Bennett

Anyway, Bill strutted into the electric shop carrying a box one day and brought it into the office.  He told me that he had ordered some equipment that was going to help me on the precipitator roof with the pigeons.  He pulled a smaller box out of the big box and handed it to me.  It was a highly technical piece of equipment known as a Sonic Bird Repeller:

Sonic Bird Repeller

Bill had bought 8 of these.  Four for each precipitator.  They were guaranteed to keep the pigeons away.  Evidently they make a high pitched noise that you can’t hear, but the pigeons can and it annoys the heck out of them.  I thanked Bill for thinking about me..  I think I was so touched by his concern that I gave him a hug…. or… maybe that was for some other reason…. it’s been a while.  This was some time around 1989.

Anyway.  I took four of the boxes and headed for the precipitator roof to try them out.  On the way there I as I was thinking about the noise that these four bird repellers were going to make, I hoped that the birds were going to be able to hear the annoying sound emanating from the little speakers over the incredibly loud noises of 168 vibrators buzzing constantly and the 672 rappers all banging away as 20 pound slugs of metal pound their anvils in order to shake the ash from the plates inside the precipitator.

You see, the roof of the precipitator is one of the noisiest places on the Power Plant Planet next to all the steam lines pushing thousands of pounds of pressure of steam through them, or next to the large fans blowing air into and out of the boiler.  — Actually, the plant was a noisy place in general… so I just hoped that the bird repellers were going to be successful in their attempt to annoy the pigeons with their imperceptible buzzing noise, or whatever noise they made.

When I arrived on the roof, I placed the 4 sonic bird repellers in the four strategic positions on the roof in order to cover the widest area possible…. that is, toward the four corners where the four electrical plug-ins were mounted on the coffin houses.  It was thoughtful of the construction hands to have placed those four receptacles just where I wanted to plug in the four sonic bird repellers ten years later.

I tried to see if I could hear anything when I turned them on, but I didn’t hear anything.  I figured that was a good thing since I wasn’t supposed to hear anything according to the instructions.  So, at least they passed the first test.

I hoped that this wasn’t a situation where the “Emperor Has No Clothes”, except in this case “The Sonic Bird Repeller Has No Sound”.  How could I tell?  I figured I would wait around and see what happened.

They didn’t interrupt the melodic symphony of rappers and vibrators as they beat and buzzed out their rendition of Brandenburg’s Concerto #3…. well, that’s what I liked to pretend anyway, since I had to spend hours at a time listening to them as I tested and adjusted rappers and vibrators as part of my normal Precipitator Roof Maintenance program.

I thought I would hang around for a while and do some adjustments on the rapper/vibrator cabinets while the pigeons all fled the scene in order to escape the atrocious sonic repellent rhapsody emanating from those four tyrannical jukeboxes I had just placed on the roof.  Glancing over my shoulder from time to time, I kept a watch on Fred and Mabel that were perched on one of the side beams not too far one of the Sonic Sound Machines.  They seemed to be more interested in what I was doing than being annoyed by the new song in town.

I could have swore that after a half hour or so, those two pigeons had developed a new way of bobbing their heads as they hid from me.  It was normal for the pigeons to climb along the beams overhead and periodically peak over the edge to see what I was up to.  I didn’t mind too much when their little heads were peering over the side, it was only when their tails waved over the side that I became attentive.  That was always a bad sign.  They did it so nonchalantly as if they were just trying to turn around on that narrow beam so they could head back in the other direction, but I knew better.

We kept the Sonic Repellers on the roof for about eight months.  I never really noticed a decrease in the pigeon population, but I do think a few operators changed their routine hangout to some other part of the boiler.  Even Glenn Morgan stopped hanging out around the transformers where he used to go hide when he was trying to “meditate” somewhere where he wouldn’t be disturbed.

I finally figured out that even though I couldn’t hear the sonic bird repellers they would give me a headache.  I don’t normally have headaches, so when I do, I know something out of the ordinary is happening…. such as I am being poisoned by Carbon Monoxide, or Curtis Love is telling me how sorry he is that he almost killed me again, or in this case…. I am working for a long period of time in the vicinity of one of the sonic bird repellers. After I figured that out, I would turn them off when I was working around them and my headaches would cease.

I suspected that when we were not on the precipitator roof, the smarter bunch of Power Plant Pigeons probably re-calibrated the repellers so that they would cause headaches in humans, so the pesky humans would leave the pigeons in peace.  They weren’t smart enough to figure out that all I had to do was unplug them temporarily.  So their backup plan was to drop special packages on my shoulder while I was working under tail causing me to forget to plug the sonic repellers back on when I left in a hurry to go wash up.

One of the more intelligent Power Plant Pigeons

After the failed and back-fired experiment with the Sonic Bird Repellers, Bill Bennett had another course of action up his sleeve.  He had contacted someone that was known as “The Bird Lady”.  She had her own company where she would go around and persuade pigeons (and other birds) to leave their roosts using another unconventional means that was deemed “less cruel” than feeding them to the welder ET (who had moved to Muskogee anyway), and outright poisoning them (which was against company policy).

Her approach was to give them something more like “food poisoning” without killing them.  After first meeting her in Bill Bennett’s office, I followed her to her car in the parking lot.  She opened her trunk and took a bucket and filled it with grain from a larger tub.  then she took some kind of powder and poured it in the bucket.  Then she stirred the bucket of grain until the powder had worked its way throughout the grain.  She was wearing the same kind of gloves you would wear if you were doing dishes and didn’t want to get dishpan hands.

Like this except she only had two hands

She explained that the powder contained her special mixture of cayenne peppers and other spices that would upset even the most hardened pigeon gizzard in the Power Plant Kingdom.  After they ate her grain, they would decide that the food around this establishment just isn’t up to code and they will fly away to find “greener pastures”.

I took her to the top of the precipitator and she poured some piles of grain not far from where I had tried the sonic bird repellers a couple of years earlier.  She didn’t want to place the grain out in the open where the regular songbirds and other flying beasties would eat it.

She came to the plant once each month for about 3 months, and that was about it.  The pigeons didn’t seem to like the grain that much, so they left it alone for the most part, except when they were in the mood for Mexican.

The third and final way that we tried Power Plant Pigeon Population Control was by the use of Pellet Guns.  Scott Hubbard and I were working on the precipitator roof during an overhaul and the pigeons were being extra pesky.  They would pick up twigs and small rocks and stuff and would drop them on our heads in an attempt to chase us away.  So, we decided to retaliate.  After all, one can only take so much abuse.

So, the next day, we brought our pellet guns from home to work with us and clandestinely carried them to the precipitator roof where we could shoot the birds that were pestering us.  I killed one with my first shot which really impressed Scott Hubbard, since I had never mentioned in all the years we carpooled together that I was a hunter (which I wasn’t).  That was just beginner’s luck.  Scott killed a few more pigeons that day, but not that many when you get down to it.

Daisy Pellet Rifle

It didn’t take long for the pigeons to realize what we were up to, so they would just stay hidden on the beams over our heads.  This didn’t give us the opportunity to just take pot shots at them, and since we didn’t have all day to just stand around and wait for their little heads to peer over the side of a beam, and since their tails didn’t really contain any “shootable” material, we just left them alone for the most part.

So, we finally decided to do the next best thing than to try to run the pigeons off or kill them.  We decided to live with them.  I had a few discussions with some of their leaders about where they should NOT poop and I agreed that I would stop calling them names like “Poop Head” hence the names “Fred” and “Mabel”.  And after that we sort of got along a lot better.  This was a new skill I had learned after I realized that I had to do the same thing for a couple of upper management people at the plant.  If I could do it with them, certainly I could learn to get along with a group of Power Plant Pigeons.

I could end this story by saying that we lived happily ever after and maybe we did.  I will share a story about what happened once when the pigeons decided to just pack up and leave one day.  I can tell you.  The result was not pretty.  But that is a story for next year (which is only a little more than a month away).

As an addendum to this story:

Years later after I had left the Power Plant to work for Dell in Texas, one day I was while wearing one of my coveted Power Plant shirts, something happened that reminded me of the days on the Precipitator roof.  I took this opportunity to let everyone around me experience a little bit of the thrill that I used to experience on a weekly basis…

While painting the ceiling in my son’s bedroom one day, I happened to drip some white paint on my shirt in just the right spot to make it look like a pigeon had pooped on my shirt.  Recognizing right away the significance of this, I quickly changed my shirt into a white t-shirt to continue painting.

Instead of quickly rubbing the paint off of the shirt, which probably would have smeared all over and ruined the shirt, I let it dry just as it was.  For the past 8 years I have proudly worn this shirt every opportunity I have knowing that when others see me, they will automatically assume that I have been “pooped on” by a bird.

Of course, I have no reaction when I see their inquisitive expression.  I just act as if nothing is wrong, which is easy, because nothing is.  Here is a picture of the shirt with the pseudo-bird dropping:

Shirt with white paint to celebrate pigeon droppings

Notice that I continue wearing this shirt even though the collar has become frayed over the years.  I keep expecting it to disappear one day into the box on the front doorstep that is sent off to help Disabled Vets.  Even though I would be honored to have a disabled vet wear my shirt, I think it would be more likely to end up in a rag box.

Originally posted November 22, 2014:  Added an addendum to the end of this story.

Power Plant Pigeons actually believe that the entire reason Power Plants were built in the first place was to provide new rent-free Pigeon roosts for Power Plant Pigeons.  Large lakes are placed alongside the Power Plant so that the pigeons can spend their days frolicking away in the immense Pigeon Bird bath supplied by the electric company.  Fields of grain are planted throughout the power plant realm in order to provide a nutritional diet to Power Plant Pigeons.  Even men with bright yellow hardhats are supplied for pigeons to fly over and target practice their Power Plant Pigeon Poop dropping skills by aiming at the bright hardhat dots below.

One Power Plant Pigeon

I wrote about the pursuit to remove Power Plant Pigeons from the Power Plant Realm two years ago when I wrote the post “Poison Pill for Power Plant Pigeons“.  In that post I explained how we had put out live traps to capture Power Plant Pigeons.  Jody Morse taught me that it was better to persuade than to try to force the pigeons into the live traps.

After I joined the electric shop, we came up with a few other ways to rid the area of pigeons.  This was more of a personal crusade, since I spent a lot of time working on the roof of the precipitator, which was a favorite haunt of Power Plant pigeons.  I had spent a lot of time with a broom sweeping up the Power Plant Pigeon leavings only to come back a few weeks later to find the entire area redecorated with artistic renditions of Salvadore Dali paintings of melting clocks.

See the resemblance?

One day when when Bill Bennett strolled into the electric shop…. well… “Strutted” is a better word to describe Bill Bennett’s type of strolling.  Bill was a skinnier version of a skinny Bill Cosby… for those of you who have not heard me mention him before….

Bill Cosby trying to look like Bill Bennett

Anyway, Bill strutted into the electric shop carrying a box one day and brought it into the office.  He told me that he had ordered some equipment that was going to help me on the precipitator roof with the pigeons.  He pulled a smaller box out of the big box and handed it to me.  It was a highly technical piece of equipment known as a Sonic Bird Repeller:

Sonic Bird Repeller

Bill had bought 8 of these.  Four for each precipitator.  They were guaranteed to keep the pigeons away.  Evidently they make a high pitched noise that you can’t hear, but the pigeons can and it annoys the heck out of them.  I thanked Bill for thinking about me..  I think I was so touched by his concern that I gave him a hug…. or… maybe that was for some other reason…. it’s been a while.  This was some time around 1989.

Anyway.  I took four of the boxes and headed for the precipitator roof to try them out.  On the way there I as I was thinking about the noise that these four bird repellers were going to make, I hoped that the birds were going to be able to hear the annoying sound emanating from the little speakers over the incredibly loud noises of vibrators buzzing constantly and the 672 rappers all banging away as 20 pound slugs of metal pound their anvils in order to shake the ash from the plates inside the precipitator.

You see, the roof of the precipitator is one of the noisiest places on the Power Plant Planet next to all the steam lines pushing thousands of pounds of pressure of steam through them, or next to the large fans blowing air into and out of the boiler.  — Actually, the plant was a noisy place in general… so I just hoped that the bird repellers were going to be successful in their attempt to annoy the pigeons with their imperceptible buzzing noise, or whatever noise they made.

When I arrived on the roof, I placed the 4 sonic bird repellers in the four strategic positions on the roof in order to cover the widest area possible…. that is, toward the four corners where the four electrical plug-ins were mounted on the coffin houses.  It was thoughtful of the construction hands to have placed those four receptacles just where I wanted to plug in the four sonic bird repellers ten years later.

I tried to see if I could hear anything when I turned them on, but I didn’t hear anything.  I figured that was a good thing since I wasn’t supposed to hear anything according to the instructions.  So, at least they passed the first test.

I hoped that this wasn’t a situation where the “Emperor Has No Clothes”, except in this case “The Sonic Bird Repeller Has No Sound”.  How could I tell?  I figured I would wait around and see what happened.

They didn’t interrupt the melodic symphony of rappers and vibrators as they beat and buzzed out their rendition of Brandenburg’s Concerto #3…. well, that’s what I liked to pretend anyway, since I had to spend hours at a time listening to them as I tested and adjusted rappers and vibrators as part of my normal Precipitator Roof Maintenance program.

I thought I would hang around for a while and do some adjustments on the rapper/vibrator cabinets while the pigeons all fled the scene in order to escape the atrocious sonic repellent rhapsody emanating from those four tyrannical jukeboxes I had just placed on the roof.  Glancing over my shoulder from time to time, I kept a watch on Fred and Mabel that were perched on one of the side beams not too far one of the Sonic Sound Machines.  They seemed to be more interested in what I was doing than being annoyed by the new song in town.

I could have swore that after a half hour or so, those two pigeons had developed a new way of bobbing their heads as they hid from me.  It was normal for the pigeons to climb along the beams overhead and periodically peak over the edge to see what I was up to.  I didn’t mind too much when their little heads were peering over the side, it was only when their tails waved over the side that I became attentive.  That was always a bad sign.  They did it so nonchalantly as if they were just trying to turn around on that narrow beam so they could head back in the other direction, but I knew better.

We kept the Sonic Repellers on the roof for about eight months.  I never really noticed a decrease in the pigeon population, but I do think a few operators changed their routine hangout to some other part of the boiler.  Even Glenn Morgan stopped hanging out around the transformers where he used to go hide when he was trying to “meditate” somewhere where he wouldn’t be disturbed.

I finally figured out that even though I couldn’t hear the sonic bird repellers they would give me a headache.  I don’t normally have headaches, so when I do, I know something out of the ordinary is happening…. such as I am being poisoned by Carbon Monoxide, or Curtis Love is telling me how sorry he is that he almost killed me again, or in this case…. I am working for a long period of time in the vicinity of one of the sonic bird repellers. After I figured that out, I would turn them off when I was working around them and my headaches would cease.

I suspected that when we were not on the precipitator roof, the smarter bunch of Power Plant Pigeons probably re-calibrated the repellers so that they would cause headaches in humans, so the pesky humans would leave the pigeons in peace.  They weren’t smart enough to figure out that all I had to do was unplug them temporarily.  So their backup plan was to drop special packages on my shoulder while I was working under tail causing me to forget to plug the sonic repellers back on when I left in a hurry to go wash up.

One of the more intelligent Power Plant Pigeons

After the failed and back-fired experiment with the Sonic Bird Repellers, Bill Bennett had another course of action up his sleeve.  He had contacted someone that was known as “The Bird Lady”.  She had her own company where she would go around and persuade pigeons (and other birds) to leave their roosts using another unconventional means that was deemed “less cruel” than feeding them to the welder ET (who had moved to Muskogee anyway), and outright poisoning them (which was against company policy).

Her approach was to give them something more like “food poisoning” without killing them.  After first meeting her in Bill Bennett’s office, I followed her to her car in the parking lot.  She opened her trunk and took a bucket and filled it with grain from a larger tub.  then she took some kind of powder and poured it in the bucket.  Then she stirred the bucket of grain until the powder had worked its way throughout the grain.  She was wearing the same kind of gloves you would wear if you were doing dishes and didn’t want to get dishpan hands.

Like this except she only had two hands

She explained that the powder contained her special mixture of cayenne peppers and other spices that would upset even the most hardened pigeon gizzard in the Power Plant Kingdom.  After they ate her grain, they would decide that the food around this establishment just isn’t up to code and they will fly away to find “greener pastures”.

I took her to the top of the precipitator and she poured some piles of grain not far from where I had tried the sonic bird repellers a couple of years earlier.  She didn’t want to place the grain out in the open where the regular songbirds and other flying beasties would eat it.

She came to the plant once each month for about 3 months, and that was about it.  The pigeons didn’t seem to like the grain that much, so they left it alone for the most part, except when they were in the mood for Mexican.

The third and final way that we tried Power Plant Pigeon Population Control was by the use of Pellet Guns.  Scott Hubbard and I were working on the precipitator roof during an overhaul and the pigeons were being extra pesky.  They would pick up twigs and small rocks and stuff and would drop them on our heads in an attempt to chase us away.  So, we decided to retaliate.  After all, one can only take so much abuse.

So, the next day, we brought our pellet guns from home to work with us and clandestinely carried them to the precipitator roof where we could shoot the birds that were pestering us.  I killed one with my first shot which really impressed Scott Hubbard, since I had never mentioned in all the years we carpooled together that I was a hunter (which I wasn’t).  That was just beginner’s luck.  Scott killed a few more pigeons that day, but not that many when you get down to it.

Daisy Pellet Rifle

It didn’t take long for the pigeons to realize what we were up to, so they would just stay hidden on the beams over our heads.  This didn’t give us the opportunity to just take pot shots at them, and since we didn’t have all day to just stand around and wait for their little heads to peer over the side of a beam, and since their tails didn’t really contain any “shootable” material, we just left them alone for the most part.

So, we finally decided to do the next best thing than to try to run the pigeons off or kill them.  We decided to live with them.  I had a few discussions with some of their leaders about where they should NOT poop and I agreed that I would stop calling them names like “Poop Head” hence the names “Fred” and “Mabel”.  And after that we sort of got along a lot better.  This was a new skill I had learned after I realized that I had to do the same thing for a couple of upper management people at the plant.  If I could do it with them, certainly I could learn to get along with a group of Power Plant Pigeons.

I could end this story by saying that we lived happily ever after and maybe we did.  I will share a story about what happened once when the pigeons decided to just pack up and leave one day.  I can tell you.  The result was not pretty.  But that is a story for next year (which is only a little more than a month away).

As an addendum to this story:

Years later after I had left the Power Plant to work for Dell in Texas, one day I was while wearing one of my coveted Power Plant shirts, something happened that reminded me of the days on the Precipitator roof.  I took this opportunity to let everyone around me experience a little bit of the thrill that I used to experience on a weekly basis…

While painting the ceiling in my son’s bedroom one day, I happened to drip some white paint on my shirt in just the right spot to make it look like a pigeon had pooped on my shirt.  Recognizing right away the significance of this, I quickly changed my shirt into a white t-shirt to continue painting.

Instead of quickly rubbing the paint off of the shirt, which probably would have smeared all over and ruined the shirt, I let it dry just as it was.  For the past 8 years I have proudly worn this shirt every opportunity I have knowing that when others see me, they will automatically assume that I have been “pooped on” by a bird.

Of course, I have no reaction when I see their inquisitive expression.  I just act as if nothing is wrong, which is easy, because nothing is.  Here is a picture of the shirt with the pseudo-bird dropping:

Shirt with white paint to celebrate pigeon droppings

Notice that I continue wearing this shirt even though the collar has become frayed over the years.  I keep expecting it to disappear one day into the box on the front doorstep that is sent off to help Disabled Vets.  Even though I would be honored to have a disabled vet wear my shirt, I think it would be more likely to end up in a rag box.