We do have lots of birds here and all day long when blueberries start ripening they are visiting my bushes regular. As soon as they start ripening they are pecking them trying to get them off… there are many half ripe berries that are already ruined… pecked to death… dang birds.
Organza bags do the trick… and with rabbiteye blueberries… you really have to wait for them to be fully ripe to get max sweetness and flavor. Bagging them is the only way I can accomplish that.
If I dont bag… the birds do not care if they are fully ripe… half blue they will eat them… and I hardly ever find a fully ripened berry because the dang birds got them earlier.
With organza bags on… I can let them get fully blue and even go a few more days past that to max ripeness. Very delicious when you get there…
I’ve always heard it’s a water thing because birds don’t have taste buds. But when I had a bird bath they still ate every single fruit thag wasn’t bagged. It’s only mockingbirds and catbirds (same family if I’m not mistaken)
I can’t find it now but I read an article not too long ago about an orchard that was partnering with a raptor rescue group to fly raptors through their orchard. They saw a big reduction in bird damage with the raptors around.
I thought it would be cool to build a tall wooden perch on a hill overlooking the orchard. If you could encourage different raptors to be frequent visitors they might help scare away those nuisance birds, not to mention helping out with the small critters that do damage to the trees.
Now, if only I was a handy enough to actually build something like that.
Plastic raptor dummies are sold here to be used in wineyards. Our neghbour uses one that he hangs from an aluminium scaffold against starlings.
I would too, but when my ducks see a kite or a buzzard they hide under bushes or next to fences for safety (and stop working for their feed).
Knock on wood birds have never bothered my blueberries. They devour every Montmorency cherry the instant they’re ripe, but so far haven’t really bothered anything else. We have a lot of birds as well, I can launch the Merlin app on my phone and in 60 seconds have upwards of 10 different birds identified.
If water is what they’re actually after, it’s abundance here may be why they don’t bother (much of) my fruit.
Starlings must have some kind of a spectrometer in their little heads. They know exactly when a haskap or juneberry is ripe and they massacre sour cherries literally within an hour of ripening. I was hoping that the algorithm went something like round + purple spectrum intensity , but no such luck with the haskap.
me peas are still small yet I’ve got peppers trying to pepper, tomato and tomatillos flowering, plums sizing up. my olive baby tried to flower all alone this spring.
After sampling home produce my dog has dragged me for a degustation tour of the starlings’ cherry breeding programme around the village perimeter. Whether it’s cherries, prunes or cherry plums, he gets into a frenzy scouring under trees that would put a truffel pig to shame. I’m not sure if he’s after sugars, crunch or acid (he keeps eating unripe windfall from our Hollywood JP), but sometimes true wild /bird cherries don’t pass his approval. In fact they are usually unpalatable unless this dark.
Walnuts are looking good so far. We have innoculated the orchard with beauveria mycelium against the walnut husk fly a year and half ago and it seems to be working well enough. There has been such extensive damage two and three harvests ago, that people started removing some trees and trialling pecans.
if you’re ever in the pnw USA, the forests are open to truffle hunting in a lot of places. plenty people take a dog out! my dog does the snuffle noises when he finds beets and carrots, he will pull and eat them sometimes.
Back when I grew a bunch of blueberries, I wouldn’t see one turn blue, much less ripen, without nets. The robins would eat them just before the first hint of blue. Cardinals took care of any the robins somehow missed and were much better at finding their way under the nets. If I ever grow them again, it will be inside a bird proof structure.
Bufo has trained himself to find scarletina boletes which have a strong umami smell. The problem is, that he also likes to bite into them and would eat them if not stopped.
Yes, that is a fact. Fortunately you have to crack the shell and crunch them into a paste for your body to have a chance to absorb it. All kernels leave his body intact. (we check )
On another note, did you know that children in Eastern and Southern Europe often consume apricot seed in amounts per sitting that are 500x of what is deemed deadly poisonous on paper? So we are either all ghosts (I even crunch all my apple seeds - what you learn in childhood, right…) or there is some disconnect between the cyanide content in those seeds and our bodies’s capacity to absorb it.
Sometimes, I do get a little hysterical after reading about all that can kill the little idiots - mainly after catching him as he vacuums elderberries around the house (wondering why the two-legged morons are screaming at him) and then I have to step back and think that elders grow everywhere around like weeds and our sugar junkie canines have coexisted with them for millenia, not dropping dead every late summer.
to find 
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