At the Sydney Opera House, seagulls are a bigger nuisance than pitchy tenors. Management is desperate to keep the ravenous sky rats away, so much that they’ve installed a large robotic bird of prey as a modern-day scarecrow.
They say it costs $6500. Which seems like a large sum for a bird-scaring machine… but compared to the $16000 mechanical falcons put up by Scotland’s Network Rail to freak out pigeons and other pesky avians at Edinburgh’s main train station, it’s a bargain.
And these scarecrowbots aren’t a novelty: They’re a burgeoning industry. The robot birds at the Sydney Opera House and Edinburgh came from Robop, a Scottish bird-scaring robot maker, has over 70 clients, including Wimbledon, the US Navy, and Johnson & Johnson.
via Gizmodo
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