England house in residential area- what can I use to deter birds like pigeons and magpies from garden?

[Mrsmockingbird]

Any ideas anyone has used that’s not too expensive and not a sound deterrent as we have elderly neighbours who are in all day so don’t want to impact them.

Thank you

Don’t you care about small garden birds that are struggling to survive when the corvids move in? I do.

Why do people have gardens? What's with this relentless need to control everything. People are increasingly intolerant of leaves, chopping down trees and ripping up gardens in favour of plastic grass and tarmac. Now you want to control what type of birds are allowed.

Same. They taunt them and flip their tails at them.

OP the garden is THEIR garden. Leave them be.

You might as well ask how do you stop it raining in your garden. It’s the outside, it has nature.

The reason we don't like magpies and pigeons is that they drive out all the lovely small birds. We no longer have blue tits nesting, or robins bobbing about or any of the other small birds that used to make our garden lovely.

Yep. Although my cats have never caught or scared a thing in my garden. Both too old and lazy and fat.
The magpies are fearless though and chase away foxes and anything else that annoys them. I don't think there's much you can do

Plenty of people have the little birds as well as pigeons and magpies. I also have very large crows (a pair and a baby), and squirrels. This is the second garden where I have them all.

If there is sufficient food sources they will co-exist. So make sure you have bee and insect friendly plants, plenty of cover and clean water available.

What nonsense, wanting to encourage small birds to thrive and not have their babies pecked to death by corvids is nothing to do with the fake grass and tarmac brigade, quite the opposite

Bit of a dramatic and angry response @hallenbad ! I don't think it is all that different. It's nature. We can't control everything. Magpies and pigeons have a right to exist.

People were mentioning air rifles within a few posts! Awful.

I get mapies and pigeons. I also get blue tits and robins and starlings and blackbirds and house martins. Buzzards overhead and skylarks in the fields. Used to get gold finches when next door used to feed them.

I know pigeons and gulls can become a nuisance in urban areas in large numbers but that's a bit different to this.

@SodOffbacktoaibu tbh I thought the same
about your first post! But thank you for elaborating. It’s not so diverse here (urban) so I understand why the op would like to give the little birds every chance to thrive.

It's not your call to control what survives and what doesn't, though. Do you crusade for aphids to be protected from ladybirds? Do you deter bats from eating moths? Do you tell cats to not eat mice? It's not your world or environment to control.

OP, You need to remember the magpies were here first.

Move to a high rise flat. If you don’t like animals, don’t have a garden.

No-one is saying they don't like animals.
Many of us are saying we preferred it when there was a far more diverse collection of birds in our gardens.

@Springtimeinsunshine we have magpies, jackdaws , wood pigeons, collared doves, blackbirds and starling's. On the small birds we have blue tits, robins, sparrows, goldfinches and the occasional wren. Plus 3 cats. All exist in the same garden.

Well, I bet you don't encourage rats, clothes moths, cockroaches, ticks, fleas, slugs etc. in your house. Depending on conditions some animals can become overwhelming, even in your back garden.

My Jack Russell thinks he's an effective deterrent, to pigeons maybe, but the magpies just sit on the shed roof and taunt him with that laugh like cackle sound they make!

No, I don't encourage pestilent insects, true. But what about foxes that eat rabbits? Should we kill the foxes? Starve them out? My point is that nature takes care of itself and, always, it is humans that interfere with balance and cause issues. Unless the environmental agency or other body that watches these things deems magpies a predatory nuisance i.e. wiping out natural wildlife, it's really not up to use to interfere out of preference for songs and cuteness.

I believe badgers are pretty gruesome but Brian May from the band Queen has a whole charity set up to protect them...etc.

Possibly the birds preferred it before humans dramatically decreased the biodiversity of the planet with our housing and our agricultural practices.

Well AFAIK rabbits were brought in by the Romans so are not native and need eating, grey squirrels are a foreign pest, nowadays hedgehogs seem to be wiped out in a big way by badgers. I am not just a fan of cuteness - we have bats in our house and they are pretty ugly 🙂 All wildlife has a purpose.
However we lived happily with most of our bats until we built an extension to our house. The soprano pipistrelles decided that the space between our roof and our new bedroom ceiling was home sweet home - set up home, bred big time... and defecated. What a stink.
Rather than wipe them out we jumped through the official hoops to exclude them (now they are only in our verandah roof). (Nb. I know we also have long eared bats and Daubenton's bats). Given the chance, often provided by humans, a wild species can multiply out of proportion as you said yourself - and I expect that applies to the corvids in gardens and therefore the exclusion of small birds. Bird tables certainly encourage squirrels and rats as well.

Well, I would be inclined to agree with all of what you've said but I'm not sure we can extrapolate the demise of particular birds in your garden to all of the UK, if you see what I mean. So, still not a great idea to interfere when you don't have all of the information and only doing so due to your preferences.

To use another non-native example, polar bears kill seals. Have you ever seen the sadness of a starving polar bear and felt sorry enough for it that you wished it would kill the seal with the big beautiful eyes? We simply can't justify interference with limited information and personal preferences. It's not fair to wildlife, IMO.

Yep!
I’ve never seen such dislike / fear / disgust about wildlife as on MN.

Are you having a laugh. Where I am (Australia) we have up to 5000 recorded magpie attacks per year - that is just those recorded, which would be a fraction of overall attacks. Of those recorded over 10% result in serious injury. I personally have treated people with eyes taken out, and head lacerations too numerous to keep count. These are not people disturbing, or interacting in any way with the magpies, just crossing the street, supervising kids playing on kid equipment in a park, or kids themselves, who seem to lose eyes more than adults, essentially people minding their own business, and then, bam, they swoop and attack. Cyclists suffer more from fall injuries as the attacks cause them to lose control of the bike while trying to fight off an attacking magpie.

They are vicious.

Our magpies killed our robin and chase and attack squirrels. Menaces