Steller's Jay

could someone please remind me why we attract birds to our gardens? I think the steller's have eaten every single sweet pea and bougainvillea bud. Am i right? also where are the beet sprouts?
Gosh they are cool and brave,like having a wild creature in the home,so beautiful BUT i think i am beginning to hate them. Ideas? thoughts? Is there a nice way to tell them to BUG OUT????
Anne

Are you positive it's the birds that are eating your stuff and not other sorts of pests? There are lots of things that will eat buds, beet sprouts, etc, everything from snails all the way up to deer so I'd make sure you're positive it's the birds before you try to get rid of them (they may be eating the thing that's eating your plants, so if you get rid of them the problems might even get worse!). I could be wrong but I don't think they even eat things like buds and sprouts--they'll eat seeds, berries, insects, snails, things like that but I suspect it's something else munching your plants. I don't have the Steller's jays, but I do have a number of scrub jays who hang around and have never seen them do the least bit of damage to a plant.

thanks ecrane
No I am not sure,that's why i am asking.Do jays eat sprouts and buds?I don't see any other creatures near my buds,and i do see them. (i can spot aphids from a mile away)However i don't read anywhere that they eat sprouts.(who could resist old fashioned sweet peas?) I see them pecking at both the sweet peas and bougie tho. I adore them,and befriended them, (its a mom and pop and 2 kids) and even let them eat my expensive and newly distributed worms. I also have Robbin's,do they eat sprouts? right now the stellers own the yard and the squirrels and humans and plants are just guests.no snails ,who else loves sprouts?

I honestly don't think there are a lot of birds that eat plants/sprouts--lots of them eat seeds, and lots of them eat berries, but if it's the other parts of the plant that are disappearing I'd tend to suspect other critters (some of which tend to mostly work at night, so you may not see them). If you see them pecking on your plants, I would guess they are eating insects. I've got lots of different sorts of birds in my yard and none of them have ever eaten my plants. If you can get a pic of a partially eaten sprout/bud/etc you could post on the Garden Pests & Diseases forum and someone may recognize what it is that's doing the damage.

Why don't you post over on the Bird Watching forum? They know their birds over there. I think ecrane is probably right though. You could put peanuts in the shell out for the jays and see what happens. Might be a messy experiment. lol

oh i already feed them! I think they are hiding stuff all over my yard.thanks for the suggestion kaperC. My mom lives in San Diego. She has an all Native Canyon.it took her 25 years or so. As for these birds,and the mystery of the sprouts and buds..i am off to the bird forum! Thanks Guys.

I did see my garden jay swoop in at my hummingbird. Glad they are faster. Thought for a minute it was a gonner.

hi dun
do i have the wrong zone? i think i do.
I am deer proofed. But the Jays have taken over my yard.I think they DO eat sprouts!
I'll let you people know what the birders say.

berkeleyannie, maybe I have the wrong zone. Berkeley has so many zones. D-mail me

Here's a detailed map showing the USDA zones, according to this you're both wrong and Berkeley is in 9b. http://images.meredith.com/bhg/pdf/gardening/hardiness/hzm_California.pdf Personally I've always found the Sunset zones more useful in predicting what plants will do well for you, their zones have led me astray much less often than the USDA zones.

And now there is a THIRD zone - the heat zone, which tells me I am in 9. :-{

That's a bummer, way too many hot days for me! I'm only in heat zone 5-6 (hard to tell from the map exactly which one, up here they change pretty quickly as you get farther in from the bay and since they don't have any cities on the map it's hard for me to tell where exactly I am) And when I put in my zip code on the site, it says 5, 6, 7 so even they don't really know! LOL

Well, I was given that number on another site. I found the actual heat zone site http://www.ahs.org/publications/heat_zone_finder.htm and it says 5-6! Makes me feel better, but it's another number to remember. We're 10 miles from the ocean and in a river valley, so we get the on-shore breezes when they blow.

Now that's a point I'll agree with : too many numbers!
With the "micro climes" in our respective cities, we have too many zones to count.
I suppose just as I learn it,it will change! :-)
A.

ZIP Code to USDA Zone Finder
http://www.gardenweb.com/zones/zip.cgi

says Im a 9 but I wanna be a 10!!!

This message was edited May 31, 2008 10:58 AM

Sorry...you'll have to move across the bay if you want zone 10! Although if you zoom in on the map that I linked to, it looks like there's a tiny area right around Point Richmond that hits zone 10, so you could go there too. But depending on air flow patterns and how protected your exact location is, it's very possible that you can grow some zone 10 plants. Or not, if you're more exposed and get more frost. I have a very hilly yard which creates lots of microclimates even within my own yard, so I have some areas that are very exposed and always get frost, and in those places I've even had trouble with some stuff that's supposed to be hardy to zone 9, but then there are other places in my garden that are much more sheltered and never get frost, so I can grow zone 10 stuff there.

And we're on a south-facing hill, which causes it's own problems! When the contractor did the grading, he kept trying to get us to orient the house the other way and we told him he was nuts. Our breeze it what makes it so great here and we use it as natural a/c unless it really gets hot, or the breeze dies. Little by little, we're learning what will live where and what won't live at all!

I'm on a west facing hill, but our summer breezes (I shouldn't really call them breezes, it's more like wind!) always come from the west so that makes it nice, every afternoon around 3 the wind always picks up, so except when we have a big heat wave and the wind stops I hardly ever need the AC. But my garden on the west side of the house is a very challenging location to garden, most of it gets full sun from about 9-10 AM until sunset, then there's the afternoon wind (so half my shrubs are leaning at an angle, not to mention the desiccating effect of the constant wind), plus that's the area that gets the most frost in the winter. But I'm experimenting and have some things there that are doing very nicely, even if they're a bit crooked from the wind!

Sounds like we have similar "challenges" but it's just a wee bit warmer here overall. From where I'm sitting, I can see a hummingbird trying to get at a flower, but the wind keeps bobbing it around! lol

Yep, sounds familiar! That happens to my hummers too! LOL