Street's wheelie bin trick to stop annoying cockatoos: 'Will it work?'
It seems a street is fed up with cockatoos littering the street with rubbish by pulling up the lids on wheelie bins — but will their preventative measure work?
Someone shared a picture to Reddit of a new tactic some locals had taken.
On the bins, zip ties were attached to the handle of the bins, creating a series of spikes to act as a deterrent.
In the photo, four bins were seen out on the road, possibly with a full load and ready for collection, all with the zip ties attached.
"Will it work?" the person asked on Reddit.
Cockatoos are known to get into rubbish bins and often cause a bit of a mess.
One man from Barden Ridge in Sydney’s south previously told Yahoo News Australia he spent an entire year trying to come up with a solution to pesky cockatoos.
However, people in the comments of the Reddit post were not convinced the zip ties would help.
"Cable ties are chewable and not that much of a deterrence," one person said.
"Yeah no way this will work, it might for a few days or weeks but it's only a matter of time. Really just a bird-friendly handle," someone else said.
"The cable ties won't stop flying bolt cutters with monkey brains for long," another person wrote.
A few people seemed to think the zip ties would just make it easier for the birds to get into the bins, while someone else noted this was more of a "magpie tactic".
Why and how cockatoos open bins
Luckily, some came up with other solutions to the problem at hand.
A few people suggested using zip ties to attach water bottles to the bin lid, adding weight and hopefully making it harder for the cockatoos to open the bin.
Sydney's Bayside Council actually shared this "hack" on social media a few years back and said it was "bin-novative".
However, some people at the time thought the water bottle trick was just glossing over the problem.
"If people looked after the environment, stopped chopping down all the trees to build more high rise, or ugly McMansions replacing grass with artificial grass and concrete, and stopped spraying insecticide which kills all the insects that birds feed on the poor birds wouldn’t need to scavenge for food scraps in bins,” some remarked.
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