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Birds & Bees |
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So the birds and the yellow jackets have been eating the fruit. The yellow jackets can really only ruin so much, but damage from the birds can cost hundreds, even thousands of dollars. There is the loss of fruit and the added sorting time after the fruit is harvested. |
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For birds we use balloons, “scary eyes,” and holographic tape, but this can only cover so much and the birds get used to them. We also have a Bird Gard and it seems to work, but the range is rather limited. It plays recorded distress and raptor calls in a cycle. I can certainly hear it from a long distance, but once you get more than about five hundred feet, it seems to lose effect on the birds. I might try getting a couple more Bird Gards next year. The birds sit around in the trees on the perimeter, swoop in, eat their fill, fly back up in the trees, wait until they finish digesting, I guess, then they swoop back down. The robins are annoying, but the real fear is a flock of migratory bids that can eat a ton an hour. |
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When there are a lot of yellow jackets you can hear the buzzing like the roar of a freeway. They suck the juice out of the grapes and leave an empty shell which can fill with moisture and then get all moldy. We use over a dozen yellow jacket traps. They can fill up quickly and we empty them, add more attractant, and hang them up again. |
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Raccoons and Coyotes eat grapes as well, but they don’t tend to travel in packs that number in the hundreds or thousands like birds and yellow jackets. |
