Birds (Dave Pehling) Slide 1 We have several species of birds that can be problems in yards and gardens. Slide 2 Birds can cause problems in a number of different ways. They, depending on the species, eat and contaminate large amounts of animal feed and human food. They get into our fruits, vegetables, various kinds again depending on the bird species. Several species can transmit diseases and parasites to human, pets, livestock, and for some species, particularly the starling, their nesting habits can contribute to fire danger. And they are just messy. Some other species such as woodpeckers can contribute to structural damage. And finally there are predators in the bird family. These are usually not a big problem to the home gardener but if you also have small livestock or you raise a small flock of chickens they can be somewhat of a problem. Slide 3 Some of the bird species, particularly those that occur in large flocks, can cause huge amounts of damage consuming animal feed and defecating in animal feed, causeing disease problems. But, they can also largely impact various fruit and vegetable crops of agriculture as well as the home garden. Slide 4 This is just a sample of bird damage in corn. You ll notice it is very neatly picked out of the cob. Other damage you might see are peck marks in apples or just missing small fruits. Cherries in particular and blueberries are very attractive to different species of birds. Slide 5 Some birds cause damage just by their defecation. In some areas where, for instance, Canada geese occur in large flocks usually near lakes but in this case we are quite a ways from the water. This is a public park and extensive defecation from the geese creates a sanitation problem where park users are walking or playing in the grass. Slide 6 This is just a few of the disease that can potentially be spread by various bird species. As far as the home gardener goes, these are not really serious problems. Although if you do have large numbers of birds pooping on your crops, you do want to be especially careful to clean those well and cook them well before using them. Page 1 of 7
Slide 7 As I mentioned there are several bird species that cause problems. Most of our birds are protected by federal law, but there are several species that are non native imports and we can use a variety of these to control them. In particular, the European Starling, European Rock Dove (otherwise known as the pigeon around here), and the English Sparrow which is actually a European Finch. Slide 8 Birds can cause problems when they get into storage units, structures, building nests, and just by roosting because of their defecation habits. Tool sheds, barns, things like that that you want to protect must be bird-proofed, especially during the spring when these birds are looking for nesting areas. The best thing to do is to have doors on the structures and just keep them closed. Make sure all the vents are screened and any openings are well protected. Slide 9 In some situations where you are constantly taking equipment in and out of structures, it may be inconvenient to have doors there that you have to get off say your lawn tractor and open the door continuously. In a case like that, if you have a species such as pigeons or swallows trying to get into structures for nesting, you can install these vinyl strip doors. They are fairly efficient in keeping birds out and you can easily drive your lawn equipment in and out of these areas. Slide 10 The places where you cannot have doors, that are open, ready access for birds to get in. Most birds like to be up above in the rafters, and you can exclude them from those areas just by installing plastic bird netting or one-inch chicken wire. Close off all openings so the birds physically have no access to those rafters. Slide 11 In situations where birds are already in structures, for instance if starlings or pigeons have gained access into eaves and are starting to build a nest, you can easily install one way doors out of galvanized wire mesh or heavy duty plastic. These are arranged so they only open outward so the birds can get out but they will flap back down and the birds cannot get in. You do have to be careful to install these before nesting really gets underway because you don t want to lock any nestlings in there. That can lead to an odor problem and it is not very nice to the nestlings to just have them starve in there. This can also be installed later in the year; make sure all the birds are out, and then these areas can be completely and securely screened to prevent the problem from happening the following year. Slide 12 Page 2 of 7
Some birds cause damage by their defecation even though they are otherwise very useful to the garden. In many situations, you can put up with that. But if they are building their nests over your garden equipment where the fecal material lands on the equipment, it is not very sanitary and can cause damage to the finish. You need to exclude them from those places. As I mentioned, our native birds are protected by law. So, once they have begun laying eggs in the nest you may not bother them until those nestlings are gone. Once the nest is empty, you can remove the nest and bird proof those areas using either bird netting, or porcupine wires, or solid obstructions of some sort. That will prevent nesting in those areas the following year. I think it is a good idea to give them alternative nesting areas though because birds such as swallows are very useful to the gardener, eating huge numbers of different kind of insects. Slide 13 This is just one situation where bird netting was used to exclude birds out of an eaves area. In a situation like this where bird netting is used, you do have to be sure to also close off the ends or some species of birds will learn to go around and gain access that way. Slide 14 In places where large numbers of birds are roosting, they can cause problems with their defecation habits and the fact that there are large groups of birds there; they may be targeting your crops. So, if you have a roosting problem, just try and make those places uncomfortable to the birds. Sometimes just erecting a forty-five degree barrier will make roosting in that area uncomfortable. Slide 15 There are other roosting deterrents available. There are commercial bird glues. These are mostly used in the commercial sector by professional PCO s. They are quite messy to use, they are not really long lasting. So, they are probably not really practical for the home gardener or homeowner in general. Slide 16 Various kinds of porcupine wires are probably more effective. It is a permanent solution, they are long lasting, you can get these either in metal or I have seen them in our local hardware stores out of stiff plastic. And these can be highly effective in preventing or at least reducing roosting. Slide 17 As far as keeping birds out of your crops, there are a variety of things you can do. Mostly we rely on scaring type devices for our native birds. There are a wide variety on the market. I am sure you are all familiar with these Mylar flash tapes. There are several brand names on the market and they can be used in a variety of ways. In this situation, they are stretched over the crop and notice that they are twisted occasionally, and that Page 3 of 7
will enable them to flash more readily in the breeze. Slide 18 Washington State University has a publication, Protecting Strawberries From Birds With Netting and Mylar Tape. That is available online. It goes into detail on how to use these materials to keep birds out of strawberries. These tips can be useful for other crops also. Slide 19 In particular for the Mylar tape, it was found that if you tie a not in this material it breaks very easily and has a short life. By using fiberglass strapping tape on the end to affix it to a core tie-down this material was found to last about a season and was much more effective. Slide 20 For strawberries, it was found the best use of this material was actually stretching in the rows between the berries. If the Mylar tape was put right over the rows of strawberries, the birds would merely land between the rows and attack the berries in that way. Slide 21 Bird tapes can be used in a number of ways. This was a shot of a department of fisheries fish rearing facility. You can see how the tapes were stretched over the water to keep diving birds from attacking the fry. Although this is not very aesthetically pleasing, I can see where a home gardener who is really desperate could do something like this over their fish pond to keep herons out. Slide 22 For most of us, protecting our gardens from birds involves using a variety of scare devices. Scarecrows, which are animal effigies or human effigies, various kinds of flashing devices which you can get commercially or you can just make them yourself. Anything like that that you can place in the garden that looks unusual, that moves, and also that you move once or twice a week can be fairly effective in reducing impacts of birds to your crops. Slide 23 Our native woodpeckers are other birds that can cause problems around the home and in the garden. Woodpeckers can cause damage in a number of ways. Setting up their territory they hammer on items and this can sometimes be the siding of your house. They will make nests in various places. Sometimes they will make nests in houses, drilling holes in the siding and trying to nest in there. Some woodpeckers also cause damage with their feeding. Now most woodpeckers do feed on insects that are attacking wood. So, ordinarily their diet consists of boring insects or insects hiding in bark and dead wood. But if you have wooden siding on your house, and you have a carpenter ant infestation, woodpeckers can cause a large amount of damage trying to get to those Page 4 of 7
ants. Likewise, if you have siding such as this that has grooves where orchard mason bees can make their nests. Now mason bees are very helpful in the garden, but if woodpeckers find that these insects are nesting in the walls of your house they will dig holes in the wood to extract the pupae and the larvae. And we do have some species of woodpeckers that actually feed on tree sap. We will show some pictures of that shortly. Slide 24 As far as keeping woodpeckers away from houses that they are attacking, mostly we are restricted to scaring type visual deterrents, scare devices. These can consist of Mylar tape, or helium balloons, pie pans tied to strings, strips of aluminum foil, anything of that sort that moves in the breeze, looks scary, and things that you can move occasionally during the week can really reduce the damage from birds. Slide 25 Any kind of hazing techniques can also work. If you happen to be at home when the woodpecker is starting to pound on your house or attacking your trees for that matter, if you have a garden hose handy you can go out and physically scare that bird away with that hose. After several attempts, sometimes they get discouraged and they will just move on. The latest research shows that strips of Mylar tape hung from the eaves work very well for repelling woodpeckers. Slide 26 Sapsuckers are one of our woodpecker species. And the gardener may not see these birds in the garden, but they will see the signs of them. And if you sit in a clinic you may get a call from a client complaining about beetles drilling holes in their trees. If so, be sure to question them closely, and ask them if the holes are arranged in any particular pattern, because beetles never make their holes in straight, horizontal lines, whereas that is indicative of sapsucker damage. And we have at least one or two sapsucker species here in our area. As you can see, they drill these sap wells actually fairly shallowly in the tree and they visit them occasionally to harvest the sap as well as the insects that come to harvest that sweet liquid. Although sometimes the damage can look very bad, such as this tree at the Washington State University Puyallup Research Station on the right, in most cases that heals over quite well. It leaves permanent scares but the tree usually remains quite healthy. Slide 27 In some situations though, and perhaps with some species of sapsuckers, they sometimes come back to the wells time after time, and they keep pecking at the sides making the sap wells larger and larger. This image from Sumner, Washington on the left for instance. Although that tree may live unless this damage goes all the way around, It is going to be scared for life and it is not very aesthetically pleasing. It also creates avenues of attack for various kinds of diseases. If you have sapsuckers trying to attack a tree, if you catch it in the bud when they are just starting you can wrap that area even with burlap, or quarter inch hardware cloth, window screen, anything to make it difficult for the bird to get into that area. And quite often they will move off to a different tree, Page 5 of 7
hopefully on somebody else s property. You can also use that Mylar flash tape. Hang that around the sight of damage and that very well will encourage the bird to move on. Slide 28 One of our very useful tools for the home garden and also commercial agriculture are the various kinds of bird netting. These can be used to cover large acreages of crops. But for most of us, we tend to shoot a little bit smaller and use smaller amounts of bird netting to protect individual bushes or individual rows of vegetable crops. Slide 29 If you are using bird netting to protect tree fruit, this really only works in the dwarf varieties because once you get over your reach it is really difficult to get this netting over the tree and secure it in a way that is effective. In order to keep birds out completely, the netting either has to touch the ground so the birds cannot get underneath it or it has to be gathered around the trunk as you see here. Slide 30 Bird netting can also be used to keep birds from hurting themselves. Every spring we get calls of clients frightened by the aggressive robins that are attacking their windows. They are merely doing that because they see the reflections of themselves in a window and they think it is rival robin trying to get into their territory. You can put hawk cut-outs on the window, sometimes that will deter them. But probably the most effective thing to do, other than covering the window to make it opaque so the bird cannot see the reflection, is to cover the window in this way as you see with bird netting. And that way even if a robin attacks the window, it will have kind of a trampoline effect. He won t hurt himself, he won t discolor the window, get it all messed up. And eventually he should move on. This attacking by territorial males is fairly short term. So, this is just a temporary fix you have to go through. Slide 31 Starlings are one of the nonnative birds that can cause a large amount of damage. They feed largely on insects but when fruit crops are ripe they can cause extensive amounts of damage, especially when they occur in large flocks. Slide 32 On the other hand, these birds can be very effective biological controls for some pests, for instance, European crane fly. A flock of starlings can almost completely remove a crane fly infestation from a lawn if they come in en mass like this. Slide 33 As far as controlling starlings, as with most birds exclusion of frightening away is the best way to go. There are starling traps on the market. These are mostly used by agriculture, and if they are used in a large area they can significantly reduce the damage from large flocks of starlings. But it is not really practical for the home gardener. Page 6 of 7
Slide 34 There are some traps that can be useful for the home gardener. These are only used for the nonnative birds. Once you catch the bird of course, it cannot be relocated and you must euthanize it. Traps can be used, for instance English Sparrows, European Starlings, sometimes trapping is effective for nest traps to removing nesting females, and of course for the nonnative European Rock Dove, or our domestic pigeon. Slide 35 As I mentioned at the beginning of this series, there are a variety of Internet resources and hard copy resources available to you. I have a list of vertebrate management links on our www.snohomish.wsu.edu website that contains a large amount of information that is relevant to our area. Slide 36 One of these resources is Russell Link s book, Living with Wildlife In the Pacific Northwest. Most chapters of this book are online and they are linked from that previous page I mentioned. Slide 37 Another excellent resource is Prevention and Control of Wildlife Damage. This hardcopy version is no longer available, but all chapters are available online. The biological information and the cultural management information is still highly relevant. But do keep in mind that any chemical management or trapping information on here must be cross referenced with more up-to-date references. In particular, Washington State trapping laws have changed vastly since the year 2000. So, you do need to keep that in mind. Slide 38 And that s it. Thanks for listening. If you have any questions, you can always contact me at the Washington State University Extension office in Snohomish County. Page 7 of 7