Here's a little mystery. Some small roads around Kloten and Effretikon have metal poles along the edge at regular intervals, with plastic bottles covered in reflective tape dangling from them. Sometimes they have dangling cds instead of bottles.

The roads themselves already have official marker reflector poles down the edges, so these extra reflectors seem a bit superfluous. Also, sometimes the poles are 2m from the side of the road instead of right on the edge.

They are not for eg bird scaring because there are no crops nearby, and they also follow the edge of the road. They do look home made, but the metal poles appear to be a standard design. Does anyone know what these are for?

Could be used to keep deer and other large animals off the road: car lights reflect off the poles and 'warn' the deer of impending SUV collison.

Maybe

Max has it right. Its for the bigger animals mainley deer!

If it's in Kloten, it's possibly to stop the planes from landing on the roads...

SUV? I'd be so lucky. What about Kamikaze Bambi vs my tin can Opel?

A wild pig once totaled my grandfather's car, so be prepared!

Great question

I drove back from Grindelwald yesterday and noticed the same.

Your answer Max, was confirmed by some very swiss colleagues of mine.

Best

Nick

What does that mean? Have I gone native ?

nah matey, you're just becoming very swiss
No offence intended

Uncle Max is right it's not only to scare deer off that they don't cross the road, as stated by bubbles4352, the poles are sometimes placed into grassland ( i presume) and this is to scare off does to not bring their babies there.
Every year thousands of Bambies get killed by farmers when they cut the grass, because the doe leaves it lying in the meadows and goes off for the search off food, the bambi remains completely hidden in the high grass and thus gets overseen by possible predators, but not only them ( see above)......

[bad taste] mental note, check local grassland for cheap cuts of venison... [/bad taste]

Thanks for that. The markers are very home-made looking, with PET bottles covered in tape. Some roads do have signs warning to watch out for wildlife, and some roads are officially blocked off from time to time because of toads... , so I would have thought the gemeinde would have a more 'official' manufactured-looking design...

A bunch of "frog fanatics" (FLF - Frog Liberation Front??) spent a whole weekend installing a temporary toad barrier next to my house in Spring and then spent a whole weekend taking it down again once the mating season was over.

Unfortunately I don't think that the barrier was high enough as the road still looked like a WW1 battlefield at times....