We’re now on the cusp of the soft fruit season. Soft fruit, in case you’re not familiar with the term, is horticultural speak for small stoneless fruit: in other words, berries. Starting with strawberries in June and ending with autumn raspberries in October, it’s possible to enjoy more than four months of delicious and health giving home-grown berries. However, it’s not just humans that enjoy soft fruit. Other garden inhabitants and visitors will want to share or, given the opportunity, completely plunder the crop. In domestic situations, unless protected, berry crops will be ransacked. The most prolific and persistent pillagers are nearly always birds.
Blackbirds are perhaps the most notorious berry addicts, but other birds will loot soft fruit. On my plot, this includes wood pigeons that guzzle gooseberries before they’ve even reached full size and robins, sparrows and tits, all of which I’ve seen sampling strawberries or loitering suspiciously under berry bushes laden with ripening fruit. In a garden where lots of berries are grown, a fruit cage is the most effective defence against marauding avians. Cages, though, can be expensive to buy and time consuming to erect and maintain. Netting easily becomes torn and, ideally, needs to be removed each winter to avoid the risk of heavy snow collecting on the mesh and collapsing the structure.
Where a fruit cage is impractical or only a small quantity of fruit is grown there are a number of methods that can help fend off birds. Forget dangling strips of flapping plastic from strings or hanging reflective CDs. Birds quickly become accustomed to such measures. Possibly more worthwhile is a suspended dummy hawk but, again, birds may soon grow nonchalant and ignore it. Far more effective is excluding birds entirely through netting. A lazy method is to loosely drape net over and around berry plants. It’s not something to be recommended as it can pull off berries when lifted for picking and, more importantly, lead to birds becoming entangled. A better approach, and one I still use on berries grown outside the fruit cage, is to encase suitable berry bushes in old net curtains. Using clothes pegs and ensuring the curtains stretch to the ground it’s fairly easy to protectively ‘dress’ bushes such as blackcurrants, redcurrants and gooseberries. A bonus is that such netting partially obscures the berries so birds are less inclined to try and get at them.
When trying to protect berries from birds it’s also worth remembering that, as with all things avian, there’s a pecking order in terms of preference for types of fruit. It also seems the eagerness with which birds steal berries varies through the season. Overall, the redder the berry and the earlier it ripens the more likely birds will try and eat it. Strawberries, for instance, fruiting in June and July, are beloved by blackbirds and will almost certainly be taken unless protected. Redcurrants are another allure. Indeed, these are often stolen when still tinted pink. Other bird favourites are ripe dessert gooseberries and hybrid berries such as tayberries. Raspberries, however, despite the redness of most varieties, seem less of an avian attraction, especially the later fruiting autumn types. The same can be said of blackcurrants and, especially, blackberries which are usually left largely untouched. There are some exceptions to this red and early ‘rule’. August and early September fruiting blueberries seem much loved by birds and are a must for protection.
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