Humane pigeon population management using avian contraceptive OvoControl® P at TransLink SkyTrain stations in the Lower Mainland of British Columbia, Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Pigeon abundance in urban environments can result in human-wildlife conflicts in the form of excrement, disease, and nuisance behaviour. Managing human-wildlife conflicts using humane, sustainable and safe methods can help mitigate conflicts and ethically address the humane treatment of animals and the environment. Traditional methods of pigeon control include netting open areas, applying spikes to prevent perching, delivering low electric shock to birds on resting surfaces, lethal control through capture and culling, and flying raptors at chosen sites. These methods rely on principles of exclusion and removal which are not effective long-term, as pigeons typically find alternative spaces to evade exclusion attempts and populations slowly increase to pre-treatment size when culled. A relatively new method of management, OvoControl® P is an avian contraceptive developed by Innolytics and is patented for pigeon control in Canada. The active compound in OvoControl® P is nicarbazin 0.5%, which disrupts the egg laying mechanisms in avian species, preventing the formation of a viable embryo. To test its efficacy as a pigeon management method for a major public transit network, eight TransLink SkyTrain stations in the Lower Mainland region of British Columbia, Canada were chosen as study sites between March 2020 and March 2021. Four control site stations dispensed cracked corn and four experimental site stations dispensed OvoControl® P. Trail cameras actively recorded video clips at each station to provide population estimates and confirm pigeons were ingesting OvoControl® P. Measures of success monitored were daily population estimates and track alarm trigger data. Results found that stations dispensing cracked corn increased pigeon populations before and after treatment, while pigeon populations at stations dispensing OvoControl® P did not change before and after treatment. Further, an unexpected result was that higher numbers of pigeons inversely correlated to track alarm triggers, perhaps due to nesting behaviour. The use of OvoControl® P within a public transportation network has shown that it can be scaled and used as a long-term, humane management approach to deal with pigeon control and testing OvoControl® P over longer time periods is recommended to see if subsequent population declines can be observed.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".