On Tuesday, we had the most awful weather – made us think it was winter rather than the tail end of the summer (I guess summer was the 2 nice weeks in April!).

Luckily, I had planned a bird exclusion and bird prevention job INSIDE 2 large storage barns! Now normally we working in most weather, but if we had been doing this bird proofing job from the outside, we would definitely have postponed this –  for both safety and sanity reasons.

Bird exclusion and bird proofing is a tricky one – birds are quite clever and very much creatures of habit, so keeping them out of a building that has been home for some time can be problematic. As we arrived, several birds were inside the pitch black building – the only light was from the ventilation slots high in the roof – the birds normal entry point.

So the first job was to eliminate any birds still trapped inside, and scare them out. The second job was to get all the expensive cars out of each building – these buildings are being used to store some pretty classy cars, so birds pooing all over them and setting the alarms off pretty much everyday was becoming somewhat of a nuisance – hence the bird exclusion was required.

During our survey, we assessed that no eggs or chicks were present in the various nests scattered around the buildings, so we knew we could just get stuck into the job without having a problem like this to deal with.

Our strategy in dealing with this problem was quite simple – block the ventilation chambers with mesh, so air could still circulate, but making sure the birds could not get in again. With such tall buildings and the shear amount of vents that needed to be secured, the only possible solution was a very large cherry picker lift. We have successfully used cherry pickers to perform this type of project many times, so its all pretty routine. The only difference today was the incredible wind speed, which would certainly have prevented us using the cherry picker if we were outside due to safety reasons.

Simon is very experienced in using these devices, so took over the role of driver, leaving me to worry about getting the netting in place, securing it and sealing the vents. Each building had about 60 outlets to cover, so it was a slow process, but with careful driving and teamwork, we cracked on at good speed, despite working at high level over some very expensive cars.

So what could have been a total disastrous day, turned out to be a really productive day in the dry – and another happy customer with no birds in their buildings!

If you have a bird problem or require bird exclusion to keep birds away from buildings etc, call Rapid Pest Control on Newbury 01635 247192 or contact us here now.

Here is a few shots from the day: