The third set of spikes went on in March. I got up the ladder in August and put my face about a metre from them.
Stainless steel, a good product, fitted straight and clean along the top flange of the rafter. Sitting in the middle of that row, wedged down into the points until you could not see them any more, was a pigeon nest. Sticks, a length of tie wire, a strip of shade cloth off the yard. Two squabs in the middle of it. The hen watched me come up the ladder and did not move. She had raised broods on that rafter before, and a bloke on a ladder was not new information.
Forty metres of covered walkway at a primary school in Melbourne's outer east, between the classroom block and the hall. Three sets of spikes in four years, each one a Saturday, a lift hire and a crew. In between, the walkway pressure washed four times a year. One term the school roped off half of it and walked the kids the long way to the hall, because a wet walkway under a roosting flock is a slip waiting to happen. Add up the installs and the washing and that school had paid for the fix several times over without ever buying it.
Here is the part most people miss looking at a photo like that. The spikes were not bad spikes. They were fitted to a ledge, and a ledge is a thing you can measure. They should have been fitted to a question, and nobody had asked it.
