ABSTRACT

Excluding birds from areas can be important in aviation safety, agriculture, and facilities maintenance. Presenting audible stimuli or predator vocalizations in the affected area often has initial success, but has a limited effect over the long-term, even if the signals are varied to reduce the chances of the birds habituating to the sounds and objects. Many birds are highly vocal and rely on auditory communication in almost every aspect of their life history. By creating noise specifically targeted to be within the vocal range of the nuisance species, we hypothesize that the birds will be less able to communicate and will move to more acoustically suitable environments. To avoid introducing noise pollution to the surrounding environment we create spatially well-controlled “sonic nets” using a mix of speakers and acoustic parametric arrays. To better understand the interaction of the sound field and the environment we combine finite difference solutions of the KZK equation with 3D acoustic finite integration simulation. These simulations allow us to propagate a nonlinear acoustic beam to a real-world target and then study the scattering from the target. We discuss initial experiments with a parametric array in an aviary on the exclusion of starlings from a food source.