The most picturesque of these wind-tossed bird scarers is the ki’-lao.  The ki’-lao is a basket-work figure swung from a pole and is usually the shape and size of the distended wings of a large gull, though it is also made in other shapes, as that of man, the lizard, etc.  The pole is about 20 feet high, and is stuck in the earth at such an angle that the swinging figure attached by a line at the top of the pole hangs well over the sementera and about 3 or 4 feet above the grain (see Pl.  LXVII).  The bird-like ki’-lao is hung by its middle, at what would be the neck of the bird, and it soars back and forth, up and down, in a remarkably lifelike way.  There are often a dozen ki’-lao in a space 4 rods square, and they are certainly effectual, if they look as bird-like to ti-lin’ as they do to man.  When seen a short distance away they appear exactly like a flock of restless gulls turning and dipping in some harbor.

FIGURE 4

Fig. 4. —­ Bird scarer in rice field.

The water-power bird scarers are ingenious.  Across a shallow, running rapids in the river or canal a line, called “pi-chug’,” is stretched, fastened at one end to a yielding pole, and at the other to a rigid pole.  A bowed piece of wood about 15 inches long and 3 inches wide, called “pit-ug’,” is suspended by a line at each end from the horizontal cord.  This pit-ug’ is suspended in the rapids, by which it is carried quickly downstream as far as the elasticity of the yielding pole and the pi-chug’ will allow, then it snaps suddenly back upstream and is ready to be carried down and repeat the jerk on the relaxing pole.  A system of cords passes high in the air from the jerking pole at the stream to other slender, jerked poles among the sementeras.  From these poles a low jerking line runs over the sementeras, over which are stretched at right angles parallel cords within a few feet of the fruit heads.  These parallel cords are also jerked, and their movement, together with that of the leaves depending from them, is sufficient to keep the birds away.  One such machine may send its shock a quarter of a mile and trouble the birds over an area half an acre in extent.

Other Igorot, as those of the upper Abra River in Lepanto Province, employ this same jerking machine to produce a sharp, clicking sound in the sementera.  The jerking cord repeatedly raises a series of hanging, vertical wooden fingers, which, on being released, fall against a stationary, horizontal bamboo tube, producing the sharp click.  These clicking machines are set up on two supporting sticks a few feet above the grain every three or four yards about the sementeras.