Cardinal - Photo from audubon.com
I like songbirds as much as anyone else, except when they're gobbling up my blueberries. Cardinals will trash a blueberry bush. Not only with they eat tons of your crop, but they'll damage tender new growth. Conventional wisdom says to use bird netting, but I just don't want to. For one thing, it is expensive, and second, I don't want to have to rig it up and rig it down. I've also been told that if you put up netting, you'll be picking at least a few dead birds out of it each season.
So to protect my crop last year, I just bought an inflatable yellow bird scare and hung it on a green stake near the bushes. The scare itself is just a big yellow beach ball, with big eyes drawn on the sides, and flash tape steamers hanging from the bottom. I would just move it around every few days so the birds wouldn't get used to it. It seemed to work very well, and I never saw any birds in the bushes.
This year it looks like we're going to have a huge crop of blueberries, and I don't want to lose any to the birds if I can help it. As I ate a snack one day, I was thinking about what other little extra thing I could do to discourage the birds from stealing my blueberries. I noted that the wrapper of the granola bar I was eating looked just like the flash tape on my inflatable bird scare, and realized that I could easily distribute several of these wrappers throughout my bushes to scare birds.
I cut the lower 9/10 of the wrappers into thin strips, and wrapped up the top with a twist-tie. They kind of look like shiny octopus Christmas ornaments made of garbage. I deployed the inflatable bird scare, and then hung several of my homemade scares in the bushes. I'll find out just how effective they are later this spring when the berries ripen.
So to protect my crop last year, I just bought an inflatable yellow bird scare and hung it on a green stake near the bushes. The scare itself is just a big yellow beach ball, with big eyes drawn on the sides, and flash tape steamers hanging from the bottom. I would just move it around every few days so the birds wouldn't get used to it. It seemed to work very well, and I never saw any birds in the bushes.
This year it looks like we're going to have a huge crop of blueberries, and I don't want to lose any to the birds if I can help it. As I ate a snack one day, I was thinking about what other little extra thing I could do to discourage the birds from stealing my blueberries. I noted that the wrapper of the granola bar I was eating looked just like the flash tape on my inflatable bird scare, and realized that I could easily distribute several of these wrappers throughout my bushes to scare birds.
I cut the lower 9/10 of the wrappers into thin strips, and wrapped up the top with a twist-tie. They kind of look like shiny octopus Christmas ornaments made of garbage. I deployed the inflatable bird scare, and then hung several of my homemade scares in the bushes. I'll find out just how effective they are later this spring when the berries ripen.
Granola Bar Wrappers
Trash recycled into bird scare.
Why buy flash tape?
Wrapper protecting bush loaded with berries.
Inflatable scare.
Berry bushes at dusk.
Huge berries slowly ripening. Can't wait to take Boy #1 out to pick them.
