Nesting falcons interrupt £200m Vodafone 4G mast upgrades Five pairs of nesting falcons have disrupted Vodafone customers' mobile phone signals in London and the south east – because the birds have set up shop on the carrier's masts. The Daily Telegraph reported that Vodafone engineers spotted the birds of prey nesting on and around base stations on a church, a hospital and an office …
It has been dual purpose ever since the falcons nested there. The problem is changing out antennae to upgrade the hardware. You climb the tower and if the birds fly away, you have "disturbed" them, which violates the law, meaning jail and or a fine for bird bothering. If they get pissed and go after you, you want a good safety net, or a parachute, and health insurance, and since they were pissed at you, you have disturbed them, again violating the law, meaning jail or a fine, after you get out of the hospital.
A few years ago I was talking to a colleague and we got on to discussing pets. At the time I had a pet budgie and in his typical disparaging(*) way he said "why don't you get rid of that and get a parrot - at least they can talk".
So I pointed out that a budgie is a parrot and in fact they appear to be one of the best human vocal imitators :)
Taxonomy can be a funny old thing.
(*)He was, frankly, an unpleasant git and one of only two people that I can claim to genuinely hate. Thankfully we parted ways several years ago.
I believe the peregrine is the only one to breed in cities, though, very useful for controlling aerial vermin.
Reg, 'falcon' is a genus, NOT a species, do yer fecking research, FFS!
I used to be a member of the RSPB, until I learnt it was IN FAVOUR of fracking.
I wouldn't hold out much hope for getting it working Londoners - our local mast was sitting on 2G for 8 days recently after Vodafone buggered up a 4G roll-out. No texts or calls on any of our 45 handsets unless we forced them all down to 2G. Not the first time it's happened either. Useless. Thank god I took the Reg's suggestion and moved my personal moby to 3 recently - what a revelation after a year of Vodafone.
... (late 70's) I worked at the Central Research Labs of EMI Ltd, a quite old building. A kestrel (or two) had found their way into some crumbling brickwork on the corner of the bulding and were seen regularly going in and out. That corner housed a small old storeroom which contained an archive of highly classified documents. It was assumed that they had shredded some documents to make their nest.
Nobody with the required clearance was willing to go in and look, so it was decided to leave them alone until the nesting season was well over.
Already covered by RFC 6214
"...routing carriers through the territory of predatory carriers may potentially cause severe packet loss. It is strongly recommended that these factors be considered in the routing algorithm used to create carrier routing tables. Implementers should consider policy-based routing to ensure reliable packet delivery by routing around areas where territorial and predatory carriers are prevalent..."
http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6214
To start with, you can market mobile service to kids using your new mascot "Fredrick the 4G falcon"!
Some other ideas:
Vodafone--Carrion' your most important conversations since 19XX!
Vodafone--Raptor-ously good customer service since 19XX!!
Vodafone--Don't be another carrier's pigeon!
Vodafone Falcon(TM) 4G--Everything else is prey!!
(Dear Vodafone, my usual rate for marketing consulting is $300/hour. Please enclose payment to M. Hack....)
I have heard that a certain group of pigeons over here acquired the irritating habit of stealing small items left lying around (ie keys) and relocating them to random locations.
It wouldn't be that hard to train them to carry more useful items ie microSD card stacks (128GB*8) so thats a pretty high data rate if wireless comms via light is used on the Tx and Rx ends.
Time until some enterprising hackers implement this for ToAC (Torrents over Avian Carriers) ... :-)
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