Martley bird scarers are very effective on many pests and use a variety of deterrent effects. Pests, particularly birds, have excellent eye sight, typically 8 times better than a young person. Our bird scarers exploit this with a 100 hertz strobe light, which, depending on the model, flashes when sounding. On silent units it is programmed for intermittent use.

Sound is useful as it alerts the pest to look at the flash, which improves the efficiency, but obviously some areas cannot tolerate noise. What is most important is the sound, pests soon get used to loud bangs, distress calls often attract other pests to find out what's happening, and see if there's a free meal in some cases! Depending on the problem, Martley's range include predator calls broadcast at totally randomised timings, all automatically, and with a volume control. Synthesised sounds can also be switched into operation, which are useful on some pests. All sound units have this option plus an option to disable the sound through the hours of darkness.

When sound cannot be used it may be possible to use a high frequency sound device, more details can be found in the silent bird scarers section.