This year ILG sponsored the Sussex Chamber of Commerce Global Player – Export Business of the Year Award 2024. Judging the award entailed visits to a varied mix of companies across the county and some fascinating conversations with owners, managers and marketing people to understand more about what makes these businesses tick at an international level.
From a shortlist of four outstanding nominees, Scarecrow Group stood out from the rest of the field and scooped the award at a spectacular ceremony in Brighton in June of this year. Scarecrow is a one-of-a-kind business, both in terms of the services it offers and the extent of its global reach from its HQ in Maresfield, East Sussex.
Founded in 1984 by Abbey Road Sound Engineer Tony Walker, Scarecrow specialises in audio bird dispersal systems. A humane alternative to the use of predators, spikes, nets, alarms and other potentially harmful deterrents, Scarecrow uses recordings of distress calls to deter birds from sensitive locations such as airports, oil platforms, railways stations and wind farms. Bird strikes pose a serious threat to aircraft, and Scarecrow solutions play an essential safety role at airports, air bases, heliports and helipads across the world.
Scarecrow has collated an audio library of over 180 distress calls, proven to work effectively across thousands of bird species. These are loaded onto audio delivery systems designed by Scarecrow to work in the harshest conditions. The company also provides data logging software that captures important data relating to deterrence incidents, such as time, location and bird species. This ensures that aviation operators and other users can minimise risk to humans and essential assets, whilst safeguarding bird welfare and compliance with health and safety regulations.
Throughout the 80s and 90s, Scarecrow’s customers were mainly airports and airbases in the UK. But with birds, humans and man-made assets everywhere in need of greater protection, expansion into sites across mainland Europe and then the rest of the world soon followed. Since 2010, under the leadership of Managing Director Lee Pannett, Scarecrow has extended its reach still further. Today, the company supports multiple industries, and their products are found in even the most remote locations. In the aviation industry alone, Scarecrow technology protected over a billion passengers in 2023.
Scarecrow participates in bird conservation too, repurposing the same audio systems to attract birds instead of deterring them. In the Seychelles, where human development or climate change has driven away bird populations in some of the outlying islands, Scarecrow broadcasts of specific mating calls have encouraged birds to return to their native habitats and revived colonies of species under threat of extinction.
Scarecrow is a shining example of how local expertise and entrepreneurial instinct, applied in the right way, can become a high-flying success story. From modest beginnings in a small Sussex village, today Scarecrow protects the lives of millions of passengers and helps to preserve bird populations across dozens of countries.
Find out more about Scarecrow at https://www.scarecrow.eu/
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