Birds that eat Japanese Beetles?

Is there some kind of bird that will eat these things? Who can I encourage to come in my yard and have a feast? And what will encourage them specifically? All I have in my yard now are feeders for smaller birds. Thanks for any help.

Hi maddio, I don't know who eats Japanese Beetles. Peanuts will bring in larger birds, in or out of the shell. You could buy a peanut silo, my woodpeckers love that feeder (I have peanut halves in mine,unsalted of course).

Hi pelletory: For some reason, we have stupid woodpeckers up here! They peck at the aluminum flashing or something on my house and the one next door. What an awful racket! There are plenty of trees here, all in various stages of life, so I know there's plenty of bugs they can get to. For some reason they like the metal. Go figure.

Starlings will eat the larvae that they can reach in the soil, but probably not the adults. Shrikes will eat the adults, but don't occur in garden habitats.

Possible that mockingbirds and thrashers would eat the adults, though I don't know for sure. Maybe crows and jays too.

Resin

Our little sparrows seem to love the JB's.

It's cute to watch them nab the JB, then fly over to the walkway(right by our patio),where they drop it, then eat it.

It's almost like they want to show us that they're "earning their keep!" :-)

So what do I do to get sparrows? We have these little brownish gray birds that I thought were sparrows. Maybe not. They're at the feeders all the time. I don't know birds really. We have plenty of crows and jays. The crows mostly go for the garbage people put out in bags.

Moles eat the grubs. If you have grubs, more than likely you have moles.

I just saw my first (and hopefully my last) Japanese Beetle, yesterday. I've been reading up on them and found this in one of my Reader's Digest books (gotta love Reader's Digest, lol):

"Invite birds into the garden by minimizing use of any broad-spectrum pesticides and by installing a bird bath, small pond, or fountain. Robins, starlings, and flickers, with the long pointed beaks needed for poking into soil, help control Japanese beetles by eating the larvae. Other birds, including cardinals and catbirds, eat the adult beetles. Make sure that fresh water is always available, but empty your bird feeders; you'll keep the birds hungry enough to snack on the beetles and grubs."

We just recently added a "water feature" (haha) to our garden. It's actually a large mixing bowl. We dig a hole the size of the bowl and put it in the ground with only a little bit of the edge sticking up over the soil line. We had many birds before, but now we have TONS! Gunna be hard to empty the feeders, though. I'll wait until I see another JB, then I'll do it, heh.

Hope this helps, maddio and everyone else!
~Kris

[photo of our "water feature," lol]

I like it! Very nice! :)

You want to put a rock in the middle of that, sticking above the water level. If a small bird got into that bowl, it might not be able to get out of the smooth sides again. A rock would give it a perch to get onto and then fly off.

Resin

Hehehe, thanks. The credit goes to my dad, though. He thought of it and ran out and did it in 5 minutes, one day, hehe. I like it too - and the birds love it! I've even seen squirrels, butterflies, and bees drink from it!

~Kris

Hey Resin, we cross-posted. Yeah, I was thinking that too. It would be too sad to see a little bird floating in there. (Although I smiled, when I saw a few wasps slipped in and drowned, hehe.) I'm gonna go do it right now. Must protect the nice critters!

~Kris

I would think that any birds that like to scratch for their meal would eat your beetles. Thrashers, Tohees, robins and maybe mocking birds. I have seen blackbirds eat them. Jays will eat anything.