The preparations to supply yourself with this lovely food source started years ago when you planted the cherry tree. Yesterday the tree was red and laden with nearly perfect fruit. You approach, bucket and ladder in hand….and find a tree dark and seething with feeding birds. The arise in a raucous flock and take off, leaving nothing but some very fresh fertilizer and a tithe of your harvest, partially pecked. You’ve been Had.
I was talking with some gardening friends about my cherry tree last week. Their first question: “How do you keep the birds from taking them all?” They know. Permaculture food production is an invaluable prep; but if you want to get the full value you’ve got to protect it. This is the story of what I tried, what worked, and what didn’t.
The problem
Although cherry crops are notorious for rapid disappearance, it’s not just them. I’ve lost peach and sunflower crops to squirrels, apple crops to deer, sweet corn to raccoons…the list goes on. In each of these cases, I didn’t know I had a pest problem until the whole crop is wiped out in one night.
So, did you ever wonder why fruit changes color and foods get more fragrant when ripe? The plants are advertising their seeds are ready for dispersal, and they payment of sweet fruit flesh they offer the dispersers and planters (that’d be the animals) is ready. The other animals know the signs as well as people do, and show up at almost the same time. Specifically…about twelve hours earlier, in my experience.
Here’s what the “I’ll protect them once I see birds” plan looked like: Birds take half the cherry, ants spoil the rest.
Solutions
Different crops require different solutions. Deer and raccoons were best discouraged by wire fencing. Slugs (who wreak havoc on strawberries) die happy if you feed them beer. Squirrels and rabbits you can shoot; or keep dogs. Birds are hard, though; because they have an angle of attack that’s hard to fence.
My first thought (last year’s) was that I’d wait until the first birds showed up to put my protections in place. Bad plan. The cherry crop started to ripen, and the earliest to be ready were delicious and undisturbed. Then much of the crop disappeared in one day while I was off at work. It was definitely birds, based on beak marks in remaining cherries. A whole flock must have come in and cleaned me out and been gone before I got home.
The bird net experiment
I’d successfully used bird netting before to protect blackberries. That was not hard, as I could reach to get the netting over the vines. It also worked well, so long as I didn’t put it on too soon. Early application kept the birds off great, but I couldn’t reclaim the net afterwards without ruining the net or the new growth of vines. Why not try the net on the cherry tree?
Well, the tree was too big to drape the net I had over, and I’m too cheap to buy a giant net without knowing how well it works. I mean, I wouldn’t put it past those beady-eyed beak-faces to land On the netting and reach through to eat the fruit. So I thought I’d test-run this year and compare a couple of good netted limbs to an un-netted area. A control group, because Science.
(I also harvested a bunch of cherries a day before their prime, because they were still darned good and that way I wouldn’t lose a big chunk of the cherry crop on the Day of Perfect Ripeness.)
Results:
The Good: The covered branches kept their cherry crop to prime ripeness, free of bird-beaks! Also, they weren’t preyed upon by ants. The ants swarmed over any cherry first damaged by a bird. Also, it worked despite gaps developing in my netting. I’d been warned the birds would exploit those, but I suppose mine hadn’t learned the trick. Yet.
Here’s what the netted branches looked like on the day the cherries were most ripe: Pristine.
The Bad: It was difficult to get and keep the light bird netting around the limbs. Getting it over the whole tree would’ve been quite the endeavor. Three people with long poles and a big piece of net are the minimum I think the job would take. A cherry-picker and/or a good supply of salty language and/or a big drum of patience would have been useful too.
The Ugly: Any cherry left un-netted got pretty ugly pretty fast once ripe. Sure, the birds missed a few hidden on the undersides of branches; but they did an admirable job of clearing off most of the visible pickings.
This is what the un-netted branches looked like on the day the cherries were perfectly ripe. Nearly bare.
In sum:
I bought more bird-net as a prep. It’s re-usable, so it could move from one crop to another as they ripen. No fruit from a store is as good as the stuff just off the tree to start with; never mind how glad I’d be to have it if I couldn’t hit up a grocery. And some protection is necessary if you want most of your crop at full ripeness.
I have heard that a selection of aluminum pie tins or scraps tied to the branches keeps the birds scared off pretty well too. That would be manageable by one person. I think I’ll try that next year. This year I just had the one cherry tree old enough to produce a testable crop.
Ok, you’ll think this old man has goon off the deep end for sure, but here goes.
Urinal Cakes, yes those HUGE mothball smelling things you see in the Men’s Restroom Urinals.
They put out the same ‘fragrance’ as Mothballs and will last several weeks when opened.
Simply place a few in the tree and the birds will leave it alone.
True but bizarre story. Back in the day (late 1980’s) I was assigned as the paper’s courthouse reporter. My best source of what all was going on at the courthouse was, of course, the janitor. Janitors know EVERYTHING that is going on.
One day, as I was walking down the hall I saw Mike, the Janitor, walking towards the bathroom storage closet with two cases of urinal cakes. Being a nosy person, I had to ask “so what on Earth are you doing with so many urinal cakes?”
He looked at me with a puzzled but bemused expression and said “Somebody keeps stealing the cakes out of the urinals in the downstairs bathroom. I put in new cakes in the four urinals, and they are good to go for a couple of days, then sometime on the third or fourth day when I clean the urinals I see the cakes are all missing again.”
Eventually it stopped happening, and as far as I know the crime of urinal-cake abduction at the courthouse was never solved.
Perhaps someone discovered it wasn’t such a great source of free soap after all.
Ahhhhh man, that’s just all out nasty, who in their right mind would reach into a urinal and grab that thing, NASTY I’m telling you NASTY
BUT, does not surprise me at all. I’m thinking Courthouse, Criminals and Lawyers HAHAHAHAHA
Well, I called around to a couple of folks I know with Cherry Trees and asked how they kept the birds off. Then I researched online as they suggested.
In sum Netting is the best option applied as soon as you get green cherries. Waiting until color blush might be too late as Spice mentioned. However very hard to do on a full sized tree. Could choose to net at least the lower branches as Spice did and then add Scare objects. That way you can assure yourself of a partial harvest if scares don’t work well. Hungry birds can get quite bold. See Mulberry comment later.
Some things like CD’s , eye balloons and fake owls work pretty well.
They will scare off birds for a little while until the birds figure out they are harmless, then you have to change the scare factor. So use CD’s, then a week or so change to scare eye balloons, then bundles of aluminum cans as rattlers.
Fake Raptors combined with accurate random raptor screeches seems to really mess with them but you need to move the Fakes daily to keep them thinking they are real. Normally this is with an Cherry Orchard and one Fake Raptor with raptor screams per three trees or so.
Some plant Mulberry Trees as sacrificial decoy to the Cherries as hungry birds will still strip you clean.
I wonder if there is a market for a Hawk Handler? A little Medieval but real raptors would keep them gone.
Whoa! Who’da thunk? Urinal Cakes. I like cake! I’ll try it! I just bought 10 Halloween décor web netting in cotton. I know I can cover a few of my sour cherry trees, by overlapping the edges. They were 10 cents apiece, being post-holiday. I have successfully used old water hose cut in 4 foot pieces. I only put them out in the branches immediately before the Day of Perfect Ripeness. I have to move them daily to imitate a snake in motion. A bird will land, give a warning shreek and fly away. I love it! I don’t know about sweet cherry protection. I only have the sour or pie cherry trees. They might be easier to defend. Cakes! I’m going to find some somewhere.
That snake trick is hilarious. Serves the little blighters right; THEY didn’t plant that tree!