Ockwells Manor cleanup
Posted on 31st March 2025 at 08:56
Pigeon guano cleaning
There’s an old saying, which is usually delivered in a fake Yorkshire accent – and it goes “Where there’s muck, there’s brass” and this is certainly true, especially in the pest control community, and for me, I just love a bit of muck.
So, I have just spent around ten days cleaning up decades (maybe even more!) of pigeon poo from the inside of Ockwells Manor in Maidenhead and for some weird reason, I just love a pigeon poo job. Honestly, its not a fetish thing!
It all started with a callout for a wasp nest that was bothering heritage builders who were trying to start the renovation of the Manor house; Marc the Site Manager had requested our services because a large wasp nest was preventing access onto scaffolding and his guys needed to do some urgent work on the roof of this historic building.
Wasp nests should be, and most often they are, a fairly quick job and because the site was active and his guys were waiting to get back to work, I said I’ll hang about for 30 minutes just to make sure that the numbers were decreasing, and that the treatment was successful.
We got to talking and he asked possibly the worst question that anyone could ask me “Do you clean up pigeon poo?”
Poor Mark, he then had 30 minutes of me jabbering away about pigeon poo with the resulting pictures from my phone of this job and that job and all the gory tales that go with them.
I don’t know why I enjoy the work, its smelly, dangerous, often uncomfortable and always with a hidden surprise nightmare, but I just do, honestly, it’s not a fetish thing.
Total cleaning for pigeon problems
I think a lot of it is, that you’re possibly the first person to see or be in an area for years and years and with historic buildings, you’ve got an Access All Areas pass to the building.
For example, you’re known by everyone as the bird shit guys, no-one wants you in the site canteen, so we usually stay away from the other contractors; we take up all our food and drink up to the working area and you’ll only get a fleeting glimpse of us now and then.
You can’t stay clean so we’re often minging; that’s military for head to toe stinking dirty, and because of that, you are physically avoided on site by all the other workers. It’s almost like we’re lepers, and as such if we’re snooping about to sightsee the building and poke our noses around the place no-one wants to deal with us, so we literally get to go everywhere. I just love it.
The inside of the dovecote - ground floor
The top floor with several decades of bird guano
The view looking through the hatch
Our place of work for two days
Professional pigeon clean ups from a local company
I do love visiting sites and going places where most people don’t go, it doesn’t have to be a historic building; a modern one will do just as well, but when you’re shown the area that needs cleaning, you just know at that point, you’re going to be left alone to get on with the job, and that’s something I cherish.
Yeah, we don’t take the hazards of pigeon poo lightly, it is extremely hazardous, possibly as much as asbestos so we take a lot of precautions, which is why I don’t like to be in areas frequented by other workers. It harks back to my fire service days, when we’re on site, we’re in charge and we have a job to do, and we got on with it.
Health and safety, micromanagement and risk assessments are all good but more often than not, they get in the way of getting the job done and if you’re working safely, then it’s nice just to be able to roll your sleeves up and get on with a bit of graft.
Another saying that I’m a firm believer of is this one = “Hard work never killed anybody”, I also love seeing the before work picture; the place is inches deep in bird poo, nesting material, dead bodies and the after picture; when it’s all clean and safe to work in.
Top of the stable block
All cleaned, this was a challenge as the floor was rotten
The other end of the stble room
It was a bird, once.
Safe and effective cleaning measures for pigeon contamination
We had five areas to clean at Ockwells Manor: the roof space of the stables, the stables themselves, the beams of the tithe barn, the bailiff’s cottage roof space and the dovecote.
The dovecote had to be done in two separate cleans, firstly the lower level was inches deep in pigeon poo, rat poo, dead birds etc and we had to go in and clean this up first.
The reason why was that the drop-down hatch had been left shut and over the following years, the depth of guano built up above, meant that you couldn’t open the hatch.
We had to cut through the wood to get up onto the first floor where we were met by over a foot thick slab of pigeon poo. At the same time, we had to pause works to ensure that bats weren’t present; bats are protected by law and, a lot of people don’t know this, and that is so are their roosts.
If bats had been present, we would have had to stop work, thankfully they weren’t, probably the combination of pigeons and rats had kept them away.
Stained glass windows at Ockwells Manor
The other areas were straightforward, possibly the worst thing that happens to old wood is that the acid in the guano corrodes the structure, one piece of wood is sound and safe to stand on, the next is brittle with a strength that’s about the same as well overdone toast.
You will put your foot through floorboards, we use crawl boards to spread the load of your body but its easy to forget, step back and put your foot on rotten wood with the subsequent lurch and fear that you’re about to fall through the roof.
It was a mixture of pigeon poo, rat poo, old straw, broken roof tiles, coke cans from the seventies and the junk that gets accumulated over several decades, all in all, what I’d call fun.
Tagged as: Pigeon control
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