Ockwells Manor
Posted on 13th April 2025 at 10:29
Ockwells Manor guano removal
Pest control’s a funny old business, one minute you’re on your hands and knees in a beautiful garden that belongs to a multi-million pound riverside property digging in mole traps, the next you find yourself standing two foot deep in pigeon poo, but as they say “Where there’s muck, there’s brass” so who am I to complain?
And in this case, there was certainly a degree of brass, for I’ve just spent ten days with my team removing tonnes of pigeon poo from buildings at Ockwells Manor in Maidenhead. This all started from a callout to treat a wasp nest that was causing a nuisance for the builders who were trying to begin renovation works at the 15th Century Manor house, the main house, stables and outbuildings are all undergoing major restoration and Marc the Site Manager had called me out to get rid of these pesky wasps.
Wasp nest treatments are usually straightforward and a fairly quick job; I guarantee my wasp treatments with a view that if I have to come back after 24 hours then its no problem. With workers trying to access scaffolding and a angry wasp nest I had to stay on site to make sure that one hit was all that was needed, and because of this I got to talking with the boss. Usually when chatting away you’ll get asked, “What’s your worst pest to deal with”? and “What’s the worst thing you’ve ever seen”? but today Marc had something on his mind and asked me “Do you clean up pigeon poo?”
Poor Mark, he’d only just met me, and he didn’t know me at all; that’s possibly the worst question anybody could ever ask me. Yes, I do is the answer! I really enjoy a pigeon job and Marc then had to endure the next half an hour of me rabbiting away about pigeons, pigeon poo with all the resulting pictures from my phone and the gory stories that go with them. It’s strange given the breadth of pest control work that I do but I enjoy this work; its smelly, its filthy and dangerous, often its uncomfortable and there’s always a surprise nightmare lurking somewhere, but I just love a really dirty, grotty pigeon job.
On these jobs you’re known by everyone on site as the bird shit guys, no-one ever wants you in the site canteen, or in reception, so we usually stay away from the other contractors and workers on site. You can’t stay clean doing this work so we wear disposable clothing, in a short space of time we’re covered in dirt and because of that, you are physically avoided on site by all the other workers. This means that you’re left alone to get on with the job, as an ex-firefighter that’s how I like to work; in the modern world there’s always someone poking their nose into your work.
I completely understand risk assessments and safe working practises – pigeon poo is extremely dangerous when either wet or dry, we’re often working on roof tops or inside compartments and machinery but its nice to just be left alone to get on with it.
The other part that I love is that we are without a shadow of doubt the first people to be in that area for years and even in some cases, decades, it’s a bit like urban exploring but with tonnes of pigeon poo.
In all we had five separate areas to clean at Ockwells Manor: the roof space above the stables, the ground floor of the stables themselves, the beams that hold up the roof of the tithe barn, the bailiff’s cottage roof space and the dovecote, both ground floor and first floor. The dovecote was the most difficult and had to be done in two separate cleans, when you opened the door to the ground floor, this was inches deep in a mixture of pigeon poo, rat poo, dead birds etc and we had to go in and clean this up before we could even climb the stairs to the top floor.
The problem here was that the drop-down hatch had been closed and over the following years, the build-up of guano built that had settled on the top side, meant that you couldn’t open the hatch. We had to cut through the woodwork to get up onto the first floor, filling the ground floor with a fresh flood of guano, a whole day’s work undone. On poking your head up through the hatch, you were met by over a foot thick slab of solid pigeon poo. At the same time, we had to pause works to allow a bat survey to take place; bats are protected by law and so are their roosts.
Stable top before cleaning
Stable top after
cleaning
The dovecote top before cleaning
The dovecote top after its been cleaned
The stairs leading up to the top of the
dovecote
Outside view of the dovecote - we spent three days cleaning this
The view inside from the hatch
After the dovecote, the other areas were fairly straightforward, possibly the worst thing that happens to old wood in these conditions is that the acidic guano corrodes the fibres, one piece of wood is sound and safe to stand on, the next is as brittle as a wafer. This means that you can easily put your foot through the floorboards, we use crawl boards to spread the load of your body but it’s easy to forget, feet, knees and even hands will punch through the extremely brittle wood and this becomes a hazard.
Nevertheless, we got it all cleaned up which allows the contractors to enter the areas and begin carrying out the restoration works, we went from an almost deserted site to one where all the trades are involved; scaffolders, cement mixing trucks, electricians, for us it was the usual mixture of poo; pigeon poo and rat poo, loads of old straw, broken roof tiles, and a few coke cans from the 1970’s and the junk that gets accumulated over several decades, all in all, the type of job I love.
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Tagged as: Pigeons
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