Clean Glass, and Bird Deterrent

Henry and Barb Chow swooped in again this afternoon, and helped me with several projects in the backyard. (We are all enjoying their retired lifestyle very much!)

The first project of the day was installing a drip irrigation system on my balcony to water my lemon and lime plants. We had gone to Home Depot yesterday to buy all the parts, and today, they taught me how to install it all. Very cool stuff! My plants will be very happy now. :)

We also washed the glass walls around my balconies. I bought a cool extending window washer thingy at Costco yesterday that did the trick. It can extend 12 feet or so, which enables me to clean the outside of the balcony walls pretty easily.


Dad, washing the balcony glass

I need to clean the glass walls because I think/hope that I found a solution to my Bird-killing house problem. The blue tape solution seems to have worked - no dead birdies since I put it up, but let's face it - not the pretties solution. Also, there is noticeably less bird activity in the backyard over the last couple of weeks, so I think it was a seasonal thing that only lasted a couple of weeks earlier in the month.

Anyhow, I found these decals on amazon.com.

Here's house they are supposed to work:

WindowAlert decals help prevent wild birds from accidentaly striking windows. Each decal has a special coating that reflects ultraviolet sunlight. This ultraviolet light is invisible to humans, but birds see it as a brilliant glow - much like a stoplight. To the human eye, the decals appear as frosted or etched glass.

So, we took off the blue tape, cleaned the glass, then affixed the decals. Believe it or not, it took 4 of us to put these on. Two to hold a string level, one to do the measurements between each decal, and one to put the decal on. Very complicated! Next time, I think we'll get a pattern (like leaves or birds) that can be put up without having to worry about accuracy!

The final product looks pretty good (better than the blue tape, at least!). We'll see if it does the job.


If you look closely, you can see two decals on the glass - pretty discreet, so that's nice.


You can see one decal on the top right reflecting the sun

Fingers crossed that these decals work, and deter any more birds from flying into the glass!

Thanks for all of your help today, Mom and Dad!! We really appreciate it!!