Pigeons out from under your solar panels and roof line for good. Galvanized mesh, spikes, netting, nest removal and a full sanitizing cleanup by the family-run crew the Central Valley trusts.
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Or Call Us NowQuick answer. Bird proofing, also called exclusion, is the permanent fix for pigeons, doves, starlings and sparrows nesting on Fresno and Central Valley homes and businesses, most often in the sheltered gap under a rooftop solar array. Pulling the nest out is only half the job, because pigeons home back to the exact spot they hatched, so the cavity has to be closed with rigid galvanized mesh clipped around the full perimeter of the array, spikes set in enough rows to cover the whole depth of a ledge, or netting tensioned across an open span. Price follows the linear feet of array edge or ledge that has to be closed and how many seasons of droppings and packed material need cleaning and sanitizing first, which is why we get on the roof and look before quoting anything.
Proper exclusion is a one time job that ends an ongoing cost. Clear the nest, clean what is under it, then close the gap so there is nowhere left to come back to.
Bird proofing in Fresno starts with a free inspection of your solar array and roofline. We remove nests and droppings, sanitize the area, then clip galvanized mesh around the array and add spikes or netting on ledges and open spans. Text photos to (559) 975-8124 for a same day quote.
Every bird problem is a little different, which is why the evaluation comes before the plan. The birds we deal with most across the Central Valley are pigeons and doves, and after that starlings, sparrows, grackles, blackbirds and, on the west side and around open water, seagulls. Each one picks a different part of a building. Pigeons and doves want the sheltered cavity under a solar array. Starlings and sparrows go for vents, gable openings and gaps behind signage. Gulls take flat commercial roofs and parapets.
What they have in common is the damage. Nesting material packs into cavities and holds moisture against your roof year round. Droppings are acidic and go to work on panel frames, flashing, mortar, paint and anything galvanized, and under winter tule fog they stay wet for weeks at a time instead of drying out. Then there is the part people call us about at 5 a.m., which is cooing and scratching directly over a bedroom ceiling.
Nobody can price a pigeon job honestly over the phone, because the two numbers that set the price cannot be judged from the driveway. The first is how many linear feet of array perimeter have to be closed. Sixteen panels in two tight rows have far less open edge than sixteen panels strung out in a single run, and mesh is sold and installed by the foot. The second is how long the birds have been up there. A nest from this spring is a bag of material. Three seasons of a colony is a cleanup job before it is an exclusion job.
So we get on the roof and look, then you get a written scope: which barrier goes where, what gets cleaned and sanitized, and exactly what the roofline looks like when we drive away. Estimates are free and we answer 24/7.

Match the barrier to the behavior. Mesh closes cavities birds nest inside, spikes deny flat surfaces they land on, and netting shuts off open spans they fly through. Most Valley homes need two of the three.
| Barrier | Right For | Why It Works |
|---|---|---|
| Galvanized mesh (critter guard) | The perimeter gap under a solar array | Physically closes the cavity. Clipped to the panel frame edge, so nothing is drilled and the array stays serviceable. |
| Bird spikes | Parapets, ledges, beams, signage, ridge lines and light fixtures | Removes the flat landing surface. Birds cannot get stable footing, so the roost never establishes. |
| Exclusion netting | Patio covers, alcoves, eaves, covered entries, open bays | Closes an entire volume rather than an edge, which is the only practical option on a large open span. |
| Cleanup and sanitizing | Every job, before any barrier | Sealing over nests and droppings traps corrosive material against your roof and leaves the smell and the health issue in place. |
The failures we get called out to fix are almost always the same three mistakes. The first is a partial job, mesh across the front edge of the array only, so the birds walk in from the side within a week. The second is skipping the clear out, which seals the mess in and leaves acid working on your flashing where nobody can see it. The third is hardware choice, because plastic clips and nylon zip ties baked by fifteen Fresno summers go brittle and let go, usually right when the mesh is holding the most weight.
What we will not sell you is a deterrent that does not deter. Gels, spinning owls, reflective tape and ultrasonic devices work on Valley pigeons for about as long as it takes the birds to notice that nothing bad has happened, which is a few days. Physical exclusion is the method that holds, which is why it is the only one we install.

Remove the worry, not just the nest. Bird proofing puts people on your roof and around your solar array, and that is not a job for the lowest bidder with a staple gun.
Because bird proofing is mostly a roof walking job, and the damage from doing it badly does not show up until the next rain. Valley Wash Pros is family owned and operated, licensed and insured, and based at 5645 W San Madele Ave #105 in northwest Fresno. We send the same crew every visit, so the people who quoted your array are the people standing on your tile.
Most Valley homes with solar have concrete or clay tile, and tile is only strong where it is supported. You walk the lower third of each tile, over the batten and the head of the tile below it, with your weight straight down instead of dragged sideways. Step in the middle of the span and you get the crack that shows up as a ceiling stain in January. On a job with a long array we set the walk path before anyone climbs, because you should never be improvising footing while carrying a ten foot roll of mesh.
The fit matters as much as the footwork. We size every clip and cut to the actual gap instead of running a roll across the front edge and calling it done, and we work the corners and the ends last so nothing is left open where the rail turns. A determined pigeon finds a two inch opening. The whole job is making sure there is not one.
Beyond the roof itself, here is what a proper bird control job protects:
We hold 4.9 stars across 644 Google reviews, and every job is backed by our 100% satisfaction guarantee. Read the reviews page, then judge for yourself. One honest note: we handle birds through exclusion and cleanup. We are not a licensed pest control operator for insects or rodents, and we will send you to the right trade when that is what the job actually calls for.

We will help protect your home from critters and pests. Birds are the common one here, but squirrels, rats and roof rats use the same gap under an array, and they do a different kind of damage.
A rodent under your panels chews. Wiring insulation, conduit and the flexible connectors between panels are all soft compared to what they normally gnaw on, and the first sign for most homeowners is a string that stops reporting rather than a noise. Squirrels also scratch panel backs and dislodge clips while they move around under there.
Critter guard is the same mesh idea applied to the whole array perimeter, sized so nothing bigger than a beetle gets through and fastened so it does not rely on the roof covering. We install it on residential rooftops and on commercial and ag buildings, and it goes on after the space underneath has been cleared and cleaned, never over the top of an existing mess.
If you own a home or a business in Fresno, Clovis, Madera or anywhere else in the Valley and you can hear something moving above the ceiling or under the panels, get someone up there to look before it becomes an electrical repair.
Because the gap under an array is the best real estate on your property: warm, shaded, dry and hidden from hawks and cats. A pigeon looking for a nesting ledge could not design a better one.
The bird is almost always the rock pigeon, the same bird that nests on cliff faces and highway overpasses. It wants a sheltered horizontal ledge with a roof over it. A rail mounted residential array sits a few inches off the roof deck and runs unbroken for twenty or thirty feet, which from a pigeon's point of view is a cliff ledge with a lid on it. That is why the birds pick the array and ignore the open roof right next to it.
The Central Valley then stacks the odds. Surrounding farmland, dairies and orchards keep the pigeon population high and fed year round, and residential solar here is about as common as it gets in California. Pigeons also nest in colonies and come home, so the young return to the roof they hatched on to breed. That is why the problem grows instead of passing, and why washing the roof off every spring never ends it. Cleaning removes the evidence. It does not remove the address.
Here is what a critter guard actually prevents:
Two more things worth knowing before someone goes up there. Old nests are wet, packed and heavy, and the material holds moisture against your roof underlayment year round. They also carry ectoparasites, which is why the nest gets bagged on the roof rather than shaken out over the yard or your patio furniture. And not every roof needs the full package. If the birds are only landing on a flat parapet or the top of a patio beam and there is no nest, spikes on that one run are the whole fix. If a dryer vent or attic vent is the entry point, that is a guard on the vent, not a job on the array, and we will say so rather than quote the array.

We offer bird control services in the following areas:
If your panels have also lost output under the mess, we can clean the array on the same visit with solar panel cleaning.
In the Central Valley it is almost always pigeons, house sparrows, starlings or swallows. Which one it is decides what we can install, and in one case it decides when we are legally allowed to touch the nest at all.
Pigeons, house sparrows and European starlings are introduced species and are not federally protected, so their nests can be removed and the access can be sealed at any time of year. Native birds are a different matter, and swallows are the ones that catch homeowners out here.
Large, grey, and they roost in the same spot forever. Pigeons are the heaviest producers of droppings by a wide margin and they are creatures of habit, which is the useful part: a pigeon problem is a location problem. Solve the ledge, the beam or the gap under the array and the birds move on rather than relocating three feet over. They also come back to a site they have used before, so removing the nest without sealing the access is a wasted trip.
Small, fast, and they fit through gaps you would not think twice about. Sparrows are the ones that end up inside a dryer vent, a fan hood or an attic vent, and they will nest in an open pipe the width of your fist. Vent guards are the whole answer here, and it is a cheap fix compared to what a nest in a dryer duct does.
Glossy black with speckles, and loud in a group. Starlings take over cavities, so they go for attic vents, eave gaps and anywhere a hole has opened up in a stucco or siding return. They are also aggressive about it and will push out whatever is already living there.
Cliff and barn swallows build those hard mud cups under eaves, on stucco and along soffits, usually in spring. Swallows are native migratory birds and their active nests are federally protected, which means once eggs are in there, nobody can legally knock it down, including us and including any company that tells you otherwise. The right move is exclusion before they arrive, or after the young have fledged and the nest is genuinely inactive. If somebody offers to pressure wash an active swallow nest off your wall in April, that is not a service, that is a liability they are handing you. We will tell you to wait, and we will book you for the window where it is actually legal and actually permanent.
Bird droppings are acidic, nesting material is dry tinder sitting next to electrical equipment, and a colony under an array gets heavier every season it is left alone.
The mess is the least of it. Here is what is actually happening while a roost is left in place.
Bird droppings are acidic. Left on painted metal, flashing, a swamp cooler housing or a solar frame, they etch. Left on concrete tile they stain into the pores the same way lichen does. On a vehicle or a patio cover the damage shows up fastest, which is usually what makes people finally call.
A dropping on a panel is not a smudge, it is an opaque blocker. Because panels in a string are wired in series, a shaded cell does not just lose its own share, it throttles what the rest of that string can deliver, and the blocked cell dissipates the difference as heat. That is the hot spot that shows up on an inspection report. Nest debris packed under the array does the same thing from below by trapping heat against panels that are designed to shed it into moving air.

A nest is dry grass, twigs and feathers, and it is sitting inches from the conduit, the connectors and the junction boxes of a live DC array in a place that hits 100 degrees for weeks at a time. We are not going to put a number on that risk because nobody honestly can, but every roofer, solar installer and fire marshal will tell you the same thing about combustible material in that location.
Accumulated droppings and nest debris are a recognised respiratory hazard once they dry out and get disturbed, which is why the cleanup is done wet, with proper protection, and bagged rather than blown or brushed off the roof. This is the part homeowners most often try themselves with a shop broom and a dust mask, and it is the part we would most strongly suggest you do not. Nest material also carries mites, and once the birds leave, the mites go looking for the next warm thing, which is frequently the attic below.

This is the single most useful thing to understand about bird work. Birds return to sites that worked before, and to sites their offspring were raised in. Clean the mess and leave the gap and you have booked the same job again. That is why every quote we write is cleanup plus exclusion, never cleanup on its own.
There is no single product that solves every bird problem. The right answer depends on whether the bird is landing on something, getting under something, or getting into something.
Three questions sort almost every job. Is it perching, is it nesting in a void, or is it entering a cavity?


Clean first, then exclude. Clip to the array, never drill it. Use material that survives a Valley summer. Those three rules are most of the difference between work that lasts and work that fails in a year.
Seal a cavity that still has birds, chicks or mites in it and you have created a much worse problem than the one you called about. Everything comes out first. Debris is removed wet and bagged, the surface is treated, and only then does anything get closed up. On a solar job this is also the only sensible time to clean the panels themselves, because the access is already set and the array is already being worked around.
Critter guard attaches to the panel frame with stainless clips. Nothing gets drilled into the panel frame and nothing gets fastened through the roof. Drilling a panel frame is a good way to void a module warranty, and putting new penetrations in a roof to solve a bird problem is trading one leak risk for another. If a quote you are comparing involves screws into the roof deck, ask what happens to that penetration in ten years.
The Valley runs over 100 degrees for weeks and the UV exposure on a roof is relentless. Cheap plastic mesh goes brittle and starts shedding within a couple of summers, and that is why so much bird proofing here looks terrible by year three. We use stainless and UV-stable material because the whole point of exclusion is that you do it once.
A barrier only works if the opening is smaller than the bird. Pigeon-rated mesh will not stop a house sparrow, and a roofline that has both is common. On barrel tile there is also the pan itself, which leaves an open arc at every course that a sparrow will happily use even after the array perimeter is closed. Those get closed separately. This is the detail that separates a job that works from a job that looks finished.



If you are already booking solar panel cleaning or roof cleaning, this is the visit to add exclusion to. The setup cost is the expensive part of any roof job and you only want to pay it once.
Every barrier we install is backed by our 100% satisfaction guarantee. If a bird finds a gap we missed, we come back and close it. Licensed, insured and family owned, on Central Valley roofs every day of the week.
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Valley Wash Pros holds 4.9 stars across 644 Google reviews, every one of them public and unedited. The three below are recent Google reviews from Valley Wash Pros customers, copied word for word. Two of them are bird jobs.
"Great service! We had a serious bird problem under our solar panels. Danny and Adrian cleared them out, washed the whole roof with antibacterial rinse and installed critter guard. So far, it's working like a charm! Thank you!"
"Valley Wash Pros are very professional. They accommodated me to schedule an appointment to pressure wash my backyard, front yard, driveway, and garage. They did a great job, and were very pleasant to work with. I highly recommend them."
"5 stars!! Helped us with pigeon issues on our solar and they were super professional, accommodating and courteous!!! Excellent experience, would highly recommend!!!"
Fresno is home base for our bird proofing crews, and the whole Central Valley is the route.
In Fresno, bird proofing is mostly a solar problem rather than a building problem. Rooftop arrays are everywhere here, from the newer developments in northwest Fresno and Woodward Park out to Clovis and Fig Garden, and every one of them creates the warm, shaded cavity a pigeon wants. Add the farmland ringing the metro area and the population it feeds, and the pattern repeats street by street.
The Valley climate makes the cleanup side worse than most markets. Summer heat bakes droppings onto panel glass and tile until they have to be softened before they will lift, and winter tule fog keeps the buildup damp for weeks at a time, which is exactly when it goes to work on flashing and frames. Waiting for a convenient season only means there is more to remove.
The older parts of town play out differently. Tower District and central Fresno homes have fewer arrays but plenty of deep eaves, open porch rafters and parapets on the commercial buildings along the avenues, and that is netting and spike work rather than mesh. Out in the ag towns, packing houses and equipment barns are the calls we get, and those are usually netting a whole open bay.

Our shop is at 5645 W San Madele Ave #105 in northwest Fresno, and the map below is where every crew rolls out from. Phones are answered 24/7 at (559) 975-8124.
Our crews run bird proofing, spikes, netting and rooftop cleanup across five counties, from Madera and Chowchilla in the north down through Visalia, Tulare and Porterville, west to Hanford, Lemoore and Los Banos, and out to Merced and Atwater. See the full service area, or start with Fresno, Clovis, Madera or Visalia.
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Homeowners and businesses across Fresno & the Central Valley trust Valley Wash Pros to get it done right the first time. Here's what they say.
Great service! We had a serious bird problem under our solar panels. Danny and Adrian cleared them out, washed the whole roof with antibacterial rinse and installed critter guard. So far, it's working like a charm! Thank you!
Valley Wash Pros are very professional. They accommodated me to schedule an appointment to pressure wash my backyard, front yard, driveway, and garage. They did a great job, and were very pleasant to work with. I highly recommend them.
5 stars!! Helped us with pigeon issues on our solar and they were super professional, accommodating and courteous!!! Excellent experience, would highly recommend!!!
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