I have used electric fly swatters to good effect, apply as in the case of the badmiton racket. For anyone thinking this is a delayed April fools joke it isn't as there really are electrick swatters and they work great, like a bug zapper without the light but looks like a small badmitton racket.
Now about birds trying to eat you out of house and home... There are store bought infra-red motion detecting ultrasonic pest thingies that put out a horrendously terrible sound (just too high up for humans to hear) when something warm bodied gets near. Uses little power, works for lots of criters, even deer. Lots of stuff that has been tried eventualy fails because the critters get used to the constant noise. The infra-red triggered ones don't let them get used to it. Every time the critter shows up this terrible ultrasonic cacophony turns on which is truly annoying to the critter. After the critter backs off it stops. If anything you get a Pavlovian response where the animal is trained to retreat from the sensor to turn off the racket.
I built a simple Rube Goldberg device that would quite likely keep peckerwoods off your house, deer out of your garden or flowerbeds, and other critters away from your XXXX as long as yor critters don't like thte hose turned on them out of the blue. It sure as "H" "E" double toothpicks kept dogs and our postman off my grass when I lived in town. A few years after I built/invented this thingy, I saw one in a catalog so it can't be that dumb.
You take a cheap (under $10) infra-red motion detecting security light (you know the kind with two flood lamps) and take the lamps out or remove the lamp holders. In the place of the light socket you wire in a water control solelnoid/valve from a discarded dish washer (got mine free from a used appliance repair place). (Hopefully yours will have been tossed for some other reason not because the valve quit.) OK, now you have an infra-red motion detecting water valve. Hook up a garden hose to the input to supply water and another hose and a sprinkler or nozzle to the output. Flip the "test" switch to the "test" position which defeats the photocell that keeps the lights from coming on in the daytime. In the test position when infra-red motion is detected the water will be turned on until infra-red motion ceases plus about 10 seconds. The turn off delay which is adjustable in "normal" operations is not functional in "test" mode and is reduced to a convenient time like about 10 seconds.
I used a rainbird sprinkler with great success. One guy nearly had his arm dislocated when his large dog on a leash was squatting in my landscaping to take a dump when the water came on. Neither the dog nor the "owner" got wet as the dog bolted when he heard the escaping air being purged from the system when the water came on. As the leash did not break, the man went with the dog. It trained my postman to use the sidewalk in only two days. Very little water is used as it only runs for 10 seconds after the "critter" leaves. In general I think everyone whose dog yanked them to escape the sound (or water if it was recently primed by another animal) thought that it was on a timer and they were just unlucky. Anyway I went from 4-5 doggy "lovenotes" per day in my landscaping to none starting with day one for as long as I used that system. I later went to ultrasonics when the neighborhood kids learned that if they played in my yard in their swim suits they would get sprayed. During water conservation times i SOCAL wasting water is a hanging offense so I went ultra-sonic.
My main reservation is that you might not have enough infra-red sensitivity to detect little birds very far away. Might work to keep them away from a particular place they peck but not protect a long run of eaves. A photoelectric sensor like is used for child safety to reverse a garage door or ring a doorbell when someone enters the store would work fine with a small bird or a bee for that matter. Anything that could block the beam would be detected and yo cold use water, ultrasonics or C-4 whatever you need to get the job done.
If anyone is electronically challenged but wants one of these things, just email me and I will scrawl out a schematic wiring diagram and post it.
Patrick
