Help! The birds, the birds!

Does anyone have any tried and true methods for bird control? They are eating my seedlings! They come to bathe in my pool (yuk!) and then they snack on my baby plants. Mr Whale (inflatable killer whale with huge "follow you" eyes), who normally keeps them away from the pool cover doesn't work anymore. Now the blackbirds are invading my garden.

These are somewhat large birds with a bright yellow beak. Very aggressive towards other birds. I have to chase them away from the spinach and lettuce.

Will they stop when the plants are bigger?

Thanks for any help .
Lena

I had a serious problem with black birds when I lived in Arkansas. I finally came up with the idea of buying a roll of chicken wire. I cut strips of it long enough to cover each row and formed it into a tunnel that stood about 6 to 8 inches high which I pegged down with landscape staples. It seemed expensive but it worked. And you can flatten the tunnels back down and roll them up to save for next year. I only left them on long enough for the plants to gain enough size that they were no longer attractive to the black birds.

I know people who will put a hawk or owl decoy in their garden. Find out what the natural predators of the birds you want to deter are and put a decoy of them in the garden. That may help. Or you can put bird net around the plot where your seedlings are, depending on the size of the plot that may not be practical though.

Naturelover - that's just what I do to deter the rabbits!

Our neighborhood is inundated with birds of all kinds. Do they have natural predators in an urban environment? Most of the trouble is the blackbirds and some smaller birds, possibly starlings or robins. The only predatory birds we have around here are the occasional hawks, but they are few and far between. They keep destroying all of the wooded areas to build on, so they are getting rarer and the bird population is exploding.

Good idea with the chicken wire! We will have some left when the gate is done. We pit up a fence around the garden due to my dog chasing the birds through it and there are wild bunnies in the "hood". Sheesh! I thought the moles would be the biggest problem and it ends up that it's the ants and the birds!

I checked into the bird net, but it's a bit costly. I may actually go back to that idea later in the season if the squirrels get to be a serious problem.

Thanks so much for your great ideas! Keep 'em coming folks!
Lena

Yes, they have predators in an urban environment. I live in the heart of St Paul MN and about 3 months ago my wife and I took a 30 min video of a hawk eating a house sparrow on our deck. It was really fascinating to watch. We have a lot of hawks in the city. The birds will know what to be afraid of.

LTilton,
LOL, we're pretty smart, huh? I thought it was the best thing I could do since I had such a big garden (1/2 acre). I did have a few rabbits in the mix too.

There was a picture of the DEC banding falcon chicks on the front cover of the Syracuse Post Standard yesterday. The peregrine falcons live on the state office building on the 20th floor. While I don't know how far from downtown they range I'm sure that the pigeons and other birds know exactly what they look like.

Well, I got to reading up on the bird situation and here's what I came up with so far. (I was trying not to have to spend any money.)

I got this from a google search:
"An effective but inexpensive device for scaring pests, such as birds, from an area to be protected is formed from an elongated, vertically extending post; a resilient wire mounted on, and extending from, the upper end of the post; and a pair of large, thin, light weight, highly light reflective discs rotatably suspended from the remote end of the wire in cantilever fashion and responsive to wind forces on the discs in order to provide a random, distracting motion as well as to cast darting light reflections in a random, erratic manner on the area surrounding the post."

Ok...I've been saving some discs from an old hard drive I took apart to make windchimes out of. Those should work. I kind of modified the design, threw in a tube from an old windchime for the occasional noise, and this is what I came up with. It's actually working quite well and I didn't have to spend any money.

Naturelover - the neat thing is that the chickenwire holds up the peas and I don't have to use a pea trellis. [these are short-vining peas]

LTilton,
I figured that out by accident too when I didn't get the chicken wire off quick enough one year. That was the only one I didn't remove after the plants got big enough. I also made it a little taller than the others, I think about 10 inches (it's been 30+ years since I did all this, LOL). Now my whole garden is fenced to keep the deer and my own sweet ol' dogs out of it.