The birds are devastating my veg this year, and its only last years crop I have not bothered with, especially the spinach, full grown plants stripped by pigeons and sparrows, this years are still under nets but soon, when it gets bigger the nets will have to come off.
So while I have had a bit of time off, I have decided to remake my "CAT" as it was so successful in two versions:-
Version 1. Just a cats head
Version 2. A full grown cat sat upright.
Instead of using plywood this time which eventually succumbed to the damp, I have made them out of plastic sheet that I "Found". A quick Google online for cat drawings gave me a good body shape for a cat sat upright, and another for just a cats head, face on. Both pictures were blown up to life size with a good guesstimate that worked first time. The full bodied cat was too big to print onto A4, so I cropped the picture into two halfs and printed each half on a seperate sheet of A4, and once again my guesswork was spot on.
Once printed, the body shapes were cut out to form a template and then drawn around onto the plastic. The body shapes were then cut out with a jigsaw. The cutouts were then fastened to long tent pegs by drilling four holes and using zip ties. By fixing the pegs now, I would have handles to hold them with when I painted them.
As my neighbour has a black cat, the birds must be wary of it prowling in my garden, so I painted all the cat cutouts black, I only had gloss so I used that. Left them to dry overnight, and then painted in the eyes, golden yellow. Both sides of the cats are painted the same.
I did plan on painting black dots in the middle of the eyes for pupils, but first I thought I would test one out. I stuck just a Version 1 on the edge of some bushes next to where a lot of sparrows have been gathering most of the time. After half an hour, nothing landed close by, or even up the garden on the veg patch, so if that's the effect of one, what will six do? plus another experimental version 1 which I plan to fix a polystyrene base to and float it in a small bucket of water dug in the ground so that wind will make it move around.
To be effective though, they have to be moved around the garden every few days when they loose their effectiveness like my previous model.