Birds like fruit. Some fruits, like prickly pears, actually evolved to benefit from the acidic environment of an animal’s digestive tract. The exposure to acid helps make it easier for the seeds to germinate. The fruits are delicious to incentivize animals to eat them and scatter the seeds around. Neat, huh?
This means that, if you are both planning to grow fruits for your own consumption and also exist in a place with birds, you need a plan. A big part of my plan involved just planting an absolute buttload of strawberry plants. Some will be eaten, sure, but that’s a sacrifice that I’m happy to make.
The other part of my plan involved special rocks.
The idea is that, if you’re concerned about birds getting into your fruit, you place inedible, non-toxic decoys around. Decorate the areas immediately around your strawberry plants with mediumish-sized rocks painted to look like strawberries, for example, and birds will leave your actual strawberries alone.
You have to do this before the plants actually set fruit, though. This is so birds have a chance to peck at the fake ones, be disappointed, and complain about your crappy, hard, imposter strawberries to all of the other birds before the real strawberries show up.
So far, it seems to be working! My strawberries haven’t produced a whole lot yet (mostly because the majority of them were just twiggy little starts a few weeks ago), but the few I’ve gotten have been untouched.
The crows, however, appear to be fascinated by my various gardening objects.
The younger ones like to play with the small black plant pots from the nursery. If a new thing shows up, they bop around to thoroughly investigate its amusement potential.
My strawberry rocks appear to be a huge hit. The crows are even trying to buy them off of me.
For serious. The strawberry decoy rock in my terracotta pot vanished, and, in its place, I received one (1) thoroughly pecked blue foam ball. It’s a very pretty shade of blue, and I appreciate it, but I’m also extremely curious about the corvid thought process that goes, “Yes. One red rock = one blue ball. Pleasure to do a business, okay.”
The thing is, I put all kinds of tasty stuff in their platform feeder as it is. Grapes. Blueberries. Bits of strawberries. And, like I said, the whole, growing strawberries have gone untouched by beak or claw. They seriously only wanted that one, particular decoy strawberry, and apparently valued it highly enough to barter for it.
I’m honestly kind of tempted to go rockhounding and see if I can pick up some nice, sparkly rocks to put by the platform feeders. We have a ton of mica around here, so I’m pretty confident that I could find something suitably eye-catching for them.
I mean, I know they’re no strawberry rocks, but maybe the crows’ll like them anyway.
Marble Crow 