Douglas Council is to clamp down on people who feed mass groups of birds in public.

A fixed penalty notice will be issued to people caught flouting the byelaw.

It will not affect people who have home bird feeders.

The council first made steps to ban the feeding of wild birds, wildlife or vermin in 2013.

Now members have now agreed to extend the area where it is banned to include the entire borough of Douglas.

The council’s agenda for its November sitting states that enforcement of the 2013 byelaws was ’restricted’.

The only areas covered under the current ban are Douglas seafront from the Bottleneck car park to the war memorial, Mona Terrace, Finch Road, Athol Street, Bridge Road, South Quay and Parade Street as well as two other areas on Prospect Terrace and Buck’s Road.

The council’s executive committee said that extending the ban to the whole of the borough would ’provide an improvement of the amenity for residents and visitors’.

At this week’s council meeting, councillors Andrew Bentley and Carol Malarkey both praised the new measures.

But Mr Bentley asked what he is supposed to tell constituents when the issue is not in public but someone is feeding mass numbers of birds in their back garden and he asked when the new measures would be introduced.

Council leader David Christian said that the new rules would be in place ’sooner rather than later’.

On the matter of people putting out food in their gardens, Mr Christian said the measures are ’not about bird feeders’ and encouraged the use of feeders in winter.

He added that the council had to make it clear that ’throwing bread and attracting sea gulls is not acceptable’.

He also made the case for extending the exclusion area to the whole of the borough by telling members of a former councillor who used to walk around non-excluded zones feeding birds and others who would walk round and drop bird seed from their sleeves.

Mr Christian added that the extension of the feeding ban would give the council’s enforcement team the ’teeth’ to deal with the issue and remove ’the potential for the area to suffer concentrated bird droppings’.