A South African World Cup stadium has turned to birds of prey to chase out rogue pigeons and rats in an anti-pest strategy that favors raptors above the pitch instead of poisons.
The new 46,000-seat stadium in coastal Port Elizabeth sports several bird and bat boxes under the outer eaves of its striking petal-shaped roof to draw aerial hunters.
“We’ve gone completely poison free. This is the only stadium with a program like this in place as a pest deterrent,” stadium manager Rob Hichens said.
PHOTO: AFP
The strategy was designed as a harmonious system — the wild raptors hunt and chase away feral pigeons, eliminating the notoriously slovenly birds’ nests and droppings which attract rats.
“Pigeons are extremely messy. The whole of town is riddled with them. I did a feral pigeon count in town and we’ve got over 10,000 birds,” said Arnold Slabbert of the Urban Raptor Project, who drew up the pest strategy.
The birds carry lice and diseases in their feces which damage the seats, while rats eat the droppings and raid the nests for eggs and chicks, he said.
PHOTO: AFP
“Immediately, you are allowing a big pigeon problem to develop, you are causing a rat problem to start as well. You don’t want pigeons in a stadium, end of story,” he said.
The raptors can be seen soaring above the 2 billion rand (US$264 million) stadium, which overlooks a lake near the city’s central business district, while wagtails are spotted feeding off insects on the pitch.
“At the moment, three African peregrine falcons live in the stadium. They hunt quite extensively,” he said. “They’re extremely effective at controlling the pigeon population. The pigeons don’t come near the stadium, they just stay away. It’s an amazing deterrent.”
Bat boxes were also erected in trees and under the outer stadium roof for indigenous bats — which can eat 132 mosquitos an hour — drawn by insects attracted by the stadium’s lights and its lake setting.
Plans are also afoot to introduce indigenous grass-eating rats in the surrounding marshy areas to provide food for hunting rock kestrels to draw them to the stadium, which has no rat problem, Slabbert said.
“I look at an integrated control of all pest species. I’m creating a complete little ecosystem here,” he said.
A hand-reared larger falcon is brought in to chase away crows, which pick on electrical wires and whose roosts can number about 100 birds. A would-be red wing starling residence has also been chased out of the stadium.
Slabbert was approached to identify potential bird problems during the three years it took to build the stadium and he has set up similar projects in the area.
“It’s the only World Cup stadium that does this and it’s the only World Cup stadium that definitely doesn’t have a bird problem,” Slabbert said.
TWO AND TWO: Lin Chen-hao of Taiwan finished seventh in the women’s U-48kg category, winning two bouts before losses the quarter-finals and a repechage match Naohisa Takato yesterday won Japan’s first gold medal at their home Olympics, beating Taiwan’s Yang Yung-wei in the men’s under-60kg judo final. Yang’s second-place finish is Taiwan’s first medal in Tokyo and the nation’s first-ever medal in an Olympics judo competition. Kosovo’s Distria Krasniqi beat Japan’s Funa Tonaki in the women’s under-48kg final less than an hour before Takato made sure that his team would not have a double heartbreak on the opening day of competition in its beloved homegrown martial art. Takato won his final three bouts in sudden-death golden score, but he took the final a bit anticlimactically after Yang committed
For Lee Yang and Wang Chi-lin, there were no chances left: Either beat the world’s top-ranked men’s doubles badminton team from Indonesia for the first time or see their Olympic hopes dashed in the preliminary round. The world No. 3 Taiwanese duo answered the challenge, edging past Marcus Fernaldi Gideon and Kevin Sanjaya Sukamuljo in their final Group A match 21-18, 15-21, 21-17 to qualify for the final eight knockout round. “We finally made it,” Lee wrote on Facebook after beating the Indonesian duo. However, he said that the competition still had a long way to go. “We’re happy not only because
Four key men’s doubles pairings — dubbed by the Badminton World Federation (BWF) as “the group of death” — are to take over two courts side-by-side today just after midday in Tokyo, in matches that already have the badminton world abuzz. What is formally known as Group A pits pairings from Taiwan, Indonesia, India and Britain against one another — the former three ranked in the top 10. Taiwanese pairing Lee Yang and Wang Chi-lin are set to challenge Satwiksairaj Rankireddy and Chirag Shetty of India, while world No. 1 duo Marcus Fernaldi Gideon and Kevin Sanjaya Sukamuljo of Indonesia are to
KEEP ’EM COMING: In her first Olympic appearance, Lo set a high bar, fighting her way to the final bouts, and earning Taiwan its second medal after Yang Yung-wei’s silver Taiwan’s Lo Chia-ling yesterday clinched the nation’s second medal at the Tokyo Olympics, grabbing a bronze medal in taekwondo in the women’s 57kg class. Nineteen-year-old Lo beat Niger’s Tekiath Ben Yessouf 10-6 at Tokyo’s Makuhari Messe convention center. Lo, who is making her first appearance in the Olympic Games, worked her way to the bronze medal contest with an early 20-18 win against South Korea’s Lee Ah-reum in the round of 16, before dropping Canada’s Skylar Park 18-7 in the quarter-final. It was Anastasija Zolotic of the US who denied the former World Taekwondo Junior Championship gold medalist a chance to fight for
RSS