Pesky birds!

My Maria’s Gold Nectarine was stripped bare of fruitlets by the birds! Didn’t know that birds eat them this early. :sob::sob::sob: only the Red Nectaplum whose fruits are camouflaged and early peaches whose fruits are bigger now remained.

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Joe, you need to hang those flashing tape to distract the birds.

Tony

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Are you sure that birds are the culprit? Two years ago (in April 2016), ground squirrels stole almost all of my peaches (I had three peach trees back then). I have been vigilantly controlling their population since then.

My property is like birds central, but I have never seen birds eating fruitlets; at least for stone fruit, they wait until the fruit is close to ripeness. Ground squirrels, on the other hand, will happily eat unripe fruit (I think they mostly use it as a source of water).

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Am very observant. We have very hungry birds. The disadvantage of having Fruits year round is you’ll have birds year round! I saw them roost on the tree and fruitlets were gone. We don’t have squirrels and we have mice but they’re nocturnal, else they would have eaten the other nectarines too.

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Joe, IF it were the rodents, and IF you still have fruitlets on your trees, they may be at risk. Once you get your better mouse trap working, I’d be curious how many you catch.
The other thing you could do is set up a game camera to see what the rodent activity level is while you sleep. :blush:

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I’m with Stan. It’s very unlikely that birds ate or removed small stone fruit after they set. It’s much more likely that the fruits just failed to set. I had lots of stone fruits that failed to set this yr. Others have reported the same. I’ve never even seen a lone bird peck on small stone fruit. No way did birds remove all the small fruits. They might have eaten the buds before they bloomed. Is that what you are thinking?

I thought I saw Chickadees removing fruits from my Apricot but like @fruitnut said, the fruits were rejected by the tree and were going to fall off. Likely the birds in my yard were going for an insect that was feeding on the dead blossoms. I can’t imagine birds going after fruit that isn’t ripe, there’s so many insects around spring time that they’re mostly insectivores and feed little on fruits and grains.

Unripe fruits can be delectable. Have you ever eaten a young almond fruitlet? They’re delicious!

I removed a row of hedges because birds (mostly sparrows) were nesting in them yearly and my fruit was being pecked to death the minute it showed any color. Hopefully they take up residence far from here…