We have now entered October 2024, and it is a landmark month for Scarecrow Group. This is the month that we hit the distinguished age of 40.
A lot has changed since we started trading in 1984. In those days, we shook up the industry by using a digital system for bird calls instead of magnetic tape. Now, our flagship product is an app, running on a tablet with computing power far beyond the wildest dreams of the ‘80s. But how did Scarecrow come to be in the first place?
Before the Beginning
Primitive bio-acoustic bird control methods were already in use before Scarecrow came along. In the late 1970s, the BBC did a short piece on the “Seagull Van”, which used recorded distress calls to clear gulls from key areas in Heathrow.
Meanwhile, Anthony Edward Walker, our much-missed founder who sadly passed away last year at the age of 85, was running his previous company, Millbank Electronics. Tony was a sound engineer by background, and under his leadership Millbank became one of the pioneers of digital audio. This specialism led Tony to enter talks with Gatwick Airport about developing a digital system to replace the tape recordings used in their answer to the “seagull van,” and the seeds of what would become Scarecrow were sown.
Scarecrow as a Side Hustle
Tony saw that there was a lot of potential to take Millbank’s work for Gatwick beyond that initial project. Digital audio systems were far more reliable than the magnetic tapes that were being used at that time, and more effective thanks to higher-fidelity call reproduction.
The way technology was going, it was inevitable that these systems would be digital sooner or later. Tony saw an opportunity to not only get in at the beginning, but use his unique expertise in the field to create a system that would still stand up when the competition started arriving. Tony made only one misjudgement. He thought this would be a small side business.
Scarecrow Takes Off
Tony worked with ornithologists as well as with his contacts in digital audio to develop core principles which still guide our products to this day. By 1984, Scarecrow’s first product, the “Digi-Scare” system was ready to sell. And, as it turned out, the aviation industry was ready to buy. Business quickly grew, with orders coming in from around the world. Tony sold Millbank and planned to run a portfolio of smaller companies, but as time went on it became clear that Scarecrow alone was growing big enough to keep him busy. And it did, for nearly three decades until his retirement in 2012.
Fast forward forty years, and though much has changed a lot has stayed the same. Digi-Scare has a direct descendent in our Premier 2020 system, and its genes also make up one half of our flagship B.I.R.D. Tab. We have products to serve a much wider range of industries than aviation, including agriculture, offshore and commercial sites. These modern products have more features, better hardware, and a wider variety of calls. But at their core, you will still find the same principles Tony was working with at the very beginning. In many ways, new technologies have not replaced what Tony did, merely grown around it.
For more information about what our products can do today and how we continue to lead the way in humane bio-acoustic bird dispersal, click here.
