On 25/06/2014 7:14 AM, Woodworm wrote:

Can anyone therefore suggest a good, effective, non-noise making bird scarer
that would go a very long way to scaring the little beggars off?

A plastic snake in the branches of trees,
a DVD hung on fishing line so it can turn and catch the light (only
works for a short time),
tuppenny firecrackers let off as you point a long metal, gun like stick
at the birds (after a while they become conditioned to taking off every
time you walk out of the house with the long metal gun like stick).

We use the latter but using a real gun. The big predatory birds eat the
tiny birds in our garden and large parrots eat all our fruit even
through the nets.

The birds are very clever and know that they need to move off quickly
and they go about a km away and stay away for several hours. We don't
have any neighbours within at least a km.