Birds are surely a welcome addition to the overall vibe and aesthetic of a garden. But apart from being an added beautification element, what if they start destroying your plants? What if the crows snatch away your corns and pigeons’ snack on your cabbage? This isn’t something you will be settling for.
However, the real question is how to keep birds away from your precious garden and vegetable plantations? Is there even a humane way possible? The answer is yes. Even if you do not welcome birds in your garden wholeheartedly because they are notorious thieves, you don’t want to harm them in the process of keeping them away.
Birds are natural pollinators and essential for the ecosystem. So harming birds is not only inhumane but harmful for the entire vegetative ecosystem. However, before we look at ways of keeping birds away from your garden, we need to understand that certain age-old methods weren’t even useful.
Birds Aren’t Stupid
It shouldn’t come as a shocker to most of you, but birds aren’t as stupid as some of us think of them to be. In fact, they are highly regarded for their intelligence and human-form understanding. They might be birds from crows to parrots and even jays, but they aren’t bird-brains in all their might. Therefore, it is crucial to throw away some traditional ways of bird-scaring out of the window.
Scarecrows established in the ground, even right in the middle of the garden, aren’t enough to scare the birds away. Because the birds are so smart, they understand that if the object is inanimate and not moving frequently, it poses no harm to them. Hence, they descend fearlessly and steal away the veggies as they please.
So using scarecrows as a defense tactic is more of a threat. As users seem to feel they have the garden protected while the birds snack on the plantations. So the tactics need to be advanced accordingly.
How to Keep Birds Away From Your Garden
Here we have compiled five excellent humane and non-toxic ways of keeping birds away from your garden, which is advanced enough to keep the birds at bay!
1. Introduce Movement
As discussed, stationary defense tactics are outdated, so we need to replace them with movement. Therefore, paper windmills, reflective CDs, or anything lightweight that would move with the help of the breeze should be able to do the trick. In fact, even if you are still keen on using a scarecrow, make sure you move it around frequently or adorn it with a cloth that flutters in the breeze to keep the birds away. Moreover, terror eyes balloons make some of the best moving decoy predators to keep the birds away as they easily sway in the breeze and are easily available.
2. Get Your Garden Netted
One of the best and most effective ways of keeping birds away from your garden is netting. You can create barriers using the technique of butterfly-netting. This allows birds to scamper away and not destroy your garden. However, smaller insects like bees and butterflies get plenty of access to pollinate your crops. It is important to make sure your netting is high-quality and pulled tightly to avoid causing any harm to the birds with no more than 1cm holes.
3. Use Chicken Wire on the Ground Area
Pinning chicken wire around your garden are is also a great way of keeping birds away. You can cover the entire length of your garden or just the specific area where you have grown your plantations. It is essentially used to protect freshly sown seeds that are just starting to grow. It disallows the access required y birds to peck at the soil and exposes the seed. You can even the wire a little high above the ground so that when the plants begin to grow, the wire lifts off automatically.
4. Place Realistic Toys
Realistic-looking toys like owls, snakes and big birds like eagles are great to be placed around the garden area. However, the same principle applies to moving them now and then to keep the effect lasting. Or you can even buy battery-operated toys of owls that flap their wings or snakes that slither around so that the birds may stay scared away. Moreover, these decoy predators may do an even better job if they make realistic sounds to go with the movement.
5. Train Your Pet
Your pet might be the best garden guard against all the birds that try to destroy your plants. However, it is important to train your pet, especially if it is a cat or a dog. These animals should be trained and made well aware that they have just to scare the birds away and not harm them. An outside dog will have a swell time chasing the birds away, and your house cat might indulge in self-entertainment by just viewing these birds that will never be able to land given the cat’s presence.
Our Final Thoughts
Keeping birds away from your garden is not challenging if you know the tips and tricks to administer the solution successfully. The idea is to keep it advanced to match the intelligence of the birds while being completely humane and non-toxic. Hopefully, the top five tips we have shared help you acquire an optimum defense against these notorious thieves and keep the birds away from your precious veggies. Cheers!