Robins, with their brilliant red breasts and their early bird-worm-getting work ethic, used to fascinate me. Lately, though, I've discovered they are the biggest threat to cherry trees since the young George Washington.
The past few weeks, I've watched my large, promising crop of ripening cherries vanish into the marauding bandits' beaks. So I began plotting the birds' demise. Let's see . . . how should I kill them? With a club? A slingshot? How about a nice pellet gun or, better yet, a semiautomatic 12-gauge shotgun?Fortunately - for the robins as well as for my neighbors - I have been able to suppress these ornicidal thoughts, succumbing to my green conscience in search of less-violent answers to this common urban-environmental conflict. And I've found I'm not alone.
"We're getting one or two calls a day," says Jerry Goodspeed, a Utah State University Extension agent. During the peak cherry season, which is in a week or two, the number of those calls will double.
"People want to know how they can keep the birds out of their cherries so they can have some cherries for themselves."
(Yeah, tell me about it.)The trouble with robins, Goodspeed explains, is that they begin to eat the cherries before the fruit is ripe. So, by the time the cherries are ready for human consumption, they've disappeared. Same goes for strawberries, another favorite treat for robins, starlings and other birds of that ilk.
"There's plenty of worms and bugs for them to eat, but they like the sweet cherries and strawberries. It's like ice cream. It's a delicacy for them."
So what can one do?
Shooting them is out. "I'm sure that's tempting for some people, but that's illegal," says Goodspeed.
Some people hang noisemakers in the trees. When the wind blows or the branches sway under the weight of a landing bird, the noise supposedly scares off the birds. Sometimes it works; sometimes it doesn't.
"You can also get an inflatable owl or a snake to set in the tree," says Goodspeed. The idea is that the robins are scared of raptors and serpents. "But birds are pretty smart. They'll stay away for the first day or two, but by the third or fourth day, they'll say, `Hey, that dumb thing doesn't move,' and so they go in there and start eating cherries again."
A bird net is the best alternative, he says. (And no, the net is not for snaring the birds so you can cut their wings off. It's to cover your tree.)
The netting is available in most local nurseries, but it's expensive. To cover a 10-foot-tall tree, for example, requires a 30-foot-by-30-foot piece of netting at a cost of $40.
Or you might do what I'm going to do: Donate your tree to nature, and take your $40 to Cherry Hill.