I Spent 20 Years Scrubbing Seagull Mess Off My Boat. Then I Started Watching Them Instead.

Jul 31, 2026

For over twenty years I owned a boat on Pittwater, and for over twenty years I lost the same argument with the same birds.

You know the routine. You get down to the boat on a Saturday morning, ready for a day on the water, and you spend the first hour of it with a bucket and a brush. Deck, rails, canopy, the spots you can't easily reach. By the time you're finished you've lost the best part of the morning and you're already thinking about doing it again next weekend.

I tried the lot. Spikes. Netting. Flapping tape. A plastic owl that the gulls sat next to, and eventually sat on. Every one of them worked for a few days and then stopped, and I couldn't work out why.

I stopped trying to scare them and started watching them

The thing that changed it wasn't a product. It was giving up and paying attention.

Because the gulls weren't just landing on my boat — they were nesting on it. Year after year, the same sheltered corners. And once I started watching properly instead of just cleaning up, I noticed something that seemed obvious afterwards and completely backwards at the time.

The gulls that nested on my boat never had company. One pair would move in and every other bird in the marina would give the whole boat a wide berth. Not because they were frightened of anything. They simply weren't interested. The spot was taken.

The birds weren't scared of predators. They were reading territory.

That was the bit I'd had wrong for twenty years, and so has nearly every product on the market.

Every deterrent I'd bought was built on the same idea: frighten the bird. But a plastic owl that never moves and never hunts stops being a threat within about two days. Birds work it out, and once they do, they never fall for it again. Territory is different. A gull deciding where to nest isn't asking "is this dangerous?" It's asking "is this taken?" And that question doesn't wear off, because it isn't fear — it's instinct.

I'd been trying to make my boat scary. What I actually needed was to make it look occupied.

Then I looked properly at the eggs

Once I knew what I was aiming for, I went and researched it properly — what real seagull eggs actually look like, and why. Here's the thing most people never notice: no two seagull eggs are the same. Every one carries its own pattern of speckles and blotches. It's not decoration. It's part of how a gull reads a nest as the real thing — and those individual markings are exactly what triggers its instinct to keep its distance.

Which explained why a bowl of identical, shop-bought fake eggs would never have worked, for the same reason the plastic owl didn't. Identical is what gives it away. A gull inspecting a nest from the air is doing a far closer read than we give it credit for.

So I set about recreating the real thing — replica nests built the way a gull expects, with eggs individually marked, no two alike. It took a fair bit of getting right. This isn't something you knock together in the shed; getting a gull to believe it is the whole job, and that's where all the work is.

It worked, and it kept working

I put a small number of those first replica nests on a handful of boats. That's the part that still surprises me — not that it worked, but that it kept working. No drop-off after a fortnight. No birds figuring out the trick and coming back. You can't habituate your way out of an instinct that old.

Once I'd seen it work on boat after boat, I found a manufacturer to make them properly, and Feck Off Birds grew from there. Same idea every time. Not a scarecrow. A nest.

If you're still out there with the bucket

You've probably tried the spikes and the owl too. Most boat owners have.

Every nest is handmade from natural materials, and every egg is individually marked — no two the same, because that's the whole point. It sits low in a sheltered corner of your deck, quietly, with nothing to install, no wires and nothing flapping in the breeze.

Free tracked shipping, delivered in 8–14 days, with a 14-day money-back guarantee. If the birds don't move on, you get your money back.

Give yourself your Saturday mornings back.

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