North American Fruit Explorers mailing list at ibiblio

["William C. Garthright" <billg@inebraska.com>]

> does anyone have experience with trap crops as a way of detering birds from 
> your desired fruit?


Not me. I've planted some mulberries, but I want them for me, too.   :-) 
 And they're all too young yet, anyway.

But this year, the April freeze eliminated so much wild fruit around 
here that the birds were worse than usual. I'd never had much trouble 
leaving my black raspberry patch un-netted, but this year, the robins 
ate every single berry, before they even had a chance to get ripe. And I 
heard from someone in Omaha that had the same experience with his 
blueberries - never a problem before, but his entire crop wiped out this 
year. There just wasn't anything else to eat, I guess.


> what kind of birds are doing the most damage?
>   


Although it was the robins on my black raspberries this year (and they 
always take SOME fruit), it's the cardinals that are the big problem 
with my grapes. That seems really odd, since cardinals are mainly seed 
eaters (I thought), but they ate all of my grapes last year. I didn't 
try CD's, but I strung up long strips of aluminum foil to blow in the 
breeze, and that didn't stop them for five minutes.

This year, I netted the grapes. That worked fine, but it sure made the 
cardinals angry! It was pretty funny, seeing them beat against the 
netting in apparent fury. Note that they couldn't have been too hungry, 
since I had feeders filled with safflower seed for them. Just got hungry 
for fruit, I guess.

Bill
Lincoln, NE (zone 5)

--
Science is not about control. It is about cultivating a perpetual 
condition of wonder in the face of something that forever grows one step 
richer and subtler than our latest theory about it. It is about 
reverence, not mastery. - Richard Powers