Birds & Squirrels

Most of us love birds and welcome them in our gardens; they are beautiful and we think of them as symbols of freedom and the spirit. But birds are actually fowl! Unless your goal is to offer up all your peaches to your feathered friends, you should probably think about ways to protect crops from bird feeding.

Birds love soft, ripening fruit like cherries, plums, peaches, and apricots, especially those that are conveniently located at the tops of trees. Sometimes a bird takes nothing more than a peck or two out of a fruit before moving on, but when fruit is ripening, one little wound can quickly become the site of a fungal infection, causing the whole thing to rot. After all your hard work, a rotten, pecked peach is a sad prize indeed. Over the years, gardeners have come up with all sorts of ideas to protect their crops from bird feeding. You could have your kids let off firecrackers all day, but you might want to try the following options first.

Netting

This is an expensive and impractical solution for large orchards, but if you have just a couple of small trees to protect, netting is your best bet. Make sure the net is not placed so close to the fruit that a bird can peck straight through it!

Scare Devices

What to do with all your old CDs? Hang them from your trees like Christmas decorations; as they spin and catch the sunlight, the flash will startle birds and drive them away. Tinsel tape will have a similar effect. Inflatable scary owls can be effective. During peach season, we use a Bird Gard "bird alarm." This is a mix of recorded warning calls played through a speaker raised up on a pole in the orchard. It signals danger to any birds in the neighborhood. To be effective it needs to be pretty loud, so you should take into account your neighbors before you invest in one of these. Scare devices are the only solution for larger orchards, and unfortunately birds do learn over time to ignore them. Be careful not to hang up any sparklies or turn on alarms until just before your fruit is starting to ripen. (Birds are attracted to fruit as it begins to turn red, which is why white and yellow cherries are less susceptible to damage than red ones.) This will maximize the efficacy of your scare device. Good luck!

Squirrels

Another growers’ enemy, squirrels love that meaty kernel in the middle of a peach pit and will dig right through the bothersome fruit to get at it. One of the few effective deterrents is Tanglefoot. If you smear Tanglefoot on the branches of your stone fruit trees it will discourage them from climbing from branch to branch. Just be careful when you pick or you will ruin your Sunday clothes. For more information, see the Cornell Guide to Growing Fruit At Home.