Fly away

You see a pigeon swooping around and he or she looks pretty cool. They make kind of a gobbling sound and they land in front of you in the park and gobble a piece of popcorn or a stray peanut and then they fly off happily.

That's ONE pigeon. You get a whole mess of them and you've got a whole mess. Mainly of guano, which is the euphemistic term we apply to the mounds of poop they leave behind.

And that's why no one wants pigeons hanging around. If you spend a good amount of time where pigeons spent a good amount of time, your drycleaning bills are higher than the national average, if you catch my drift. 

Pigeons are the most persistent invasive bird species among birds. You can't get cardinals or grackles to do this kind of work. Pigeons do $1.1 Billion with a b damages annually in the United States alone.

For years, there was nothing to do about the population of poopers (or the poopulation of poppers) except leaning out the window and hollering to them that should leave at once.

Now science and the drone squads of the world have come up with an answer. Researchers at EPFL in Switzerland have figured out how to notify a drone that pigeons have formed a mob on a roof. This in turn deployed a drone to go up and scare away the birds, either by the annoying sound of the little blades, or, if that doesn't work, it plays the audio from Fox News with an occasional tune by Michael Bublé, and man, you ought to see them fly away when he launches into "Feeling Good." 

Much like one of those ROOMBA vacuum cleaners, the drone here remains in a base while a camera scans the roof in question with a "neural object detector." Once a gang of pigeons is spotted, the base gives the drone the coordinates of their location, and off goes the drone. 

Once the mission is complete, the base returns home to await its next call to action.

In some places, it is illegal to operate an autonomous drone, so the company has to hire someone's previously unemployable brother-in-law to sit around and watch for the pigeon alert, and then he puts his coffee down long enough to operate the drone.

Tests prove the success of the EPFL system. In the past, a flock could loiter as long as 2.5 hours on a roof and make a big dungy mess, but when the drone gets to droning, hanging-around time is down to just a couple of minutes.

And the torpid brother-in-law has found work, so it's all good!