Almond producer decreases parrot presence by 80%

Location:	Paine, Maipo Alto, Chile
Application context:	Almond production
Problem definition:	Burrowing parrots eating the almonds
Bird species:	Burrowing parrots (Psittacidae)
Time of the year with bird problems:	February – March
Time of the day with bird problems:	From dusk till dawn
Number of systems:	1 x Agrilaser Autonomic 500 with solar panel
In use sinse:	February 2018
Laser projection area:	27 hectares
Potential damage per hectare:	300 kg (10%)
Total bird reduction after the Autonomic’s installation:	80%

Agrícola El Lingal is decreasing the protected parrot presence in an animal friendly

Agrícola El Lingal has 47 hectares of almonds in the Maipo Valley. About 5 years ago, the presence of burrowing parrots in the Maipo Valley began to be noticed, they are the protected species and one of the four varieties of native parrots in Chile. “Before this year my neigbors suffered the most by these parrots. This year we saw a significant increase of parrot presence ourselves. We decided to look for an animal friendly solution to our parrot problem without harming these protected species.” Juan Guerrero, director of Agrícola El Lingal says.

“We currently have 47 hectares of almond trees planted and are planning on adding 20 more hectares. This was the first year that the parrots would damage our almonds instead of our neighbors’ crops early in the season when the almonds began to open.”

Juan Guerrero continues: “We saw that our neighbors had a lot of damage caused by parrots in the previous years, which resulted in a loss of over 300 kg per hectare which is around 10% per hectare. So after we started noticing a lot of parrot presence on our crops and many almond peels on the ground we became quite desperate.”

“We know from our neighbors that they already tried gas cannons which were not effective because the parrots got used to it. We looked into other alternatives including bird repellents.” 

Nothing seemed the right and animal friendly solution Juan was looking for. He finally started searching on the internet and came across BirdChile, a reseller of Bird Control Group that offers the Autonomic laser bird deterrents. Juan thought it would be an interesting alternative.

“After the installation we started to monitor and observe the parrot presence, after a few days the parrot presence decreased considerably. They moved away from our crops to the trees around our area. The parrots never returned to our almonds. I can absolutely see an estimated decrease of 80%, the lasers helped us reduce the crop loss significantly.”