How to Keep Birds Out of the Garden: Humane Deterrent Methods

Birds are welcome in the garden, but if crows devour your corn and jays eat your berries, here are ways to deter them and live in harmony.

• Have a party! Scary balloons (vinyl balls with menacing faces) from garden centers or online. Make your own with shiny Mylar balloons on posts. Tie shiny ribbon or surveyor's tape for more effect; move them every few days.
• Build a barrier. Place inverted crates or disposable cups (bottoms cut out) over vulnerable seedlings. Chicken wire over seedbeds works too—raise it with boards/bricks as seedlings grow. "I made a cone from window screen for tomatoes," says a Maryland gardener. "When too big, switched to netting."
• Cast a net. "Netting is the only certain bird deterrent," says Pippa Greenwood, author of American Horticultural Society Pests & Diseases. Build inexpensive framework (bamboo poles, fence posts, tall stakes) to cover plants. Drape netting to ground, anchor with bent wire for wind protection. For short rows, make a V-shaped "tent" to protect seedlings until rooted well enough to resist pulling.
• Throw some line. Fishing line or black thread woven over the garden stymies birds. "Birds don't like wires," says Wagner. "Put posts around the garden and weave thread/line over crops."
• Go high-tech. Birdbusters (www.birdbusters.com) makes a sophisticated screech owl that spins in wind with a microchip emitting attacking hawk sounds.
• Go low-tech. Old-time cure: soak quarts of dried corn in whiskey, scatter for crows. They'd get corned!
• Remember the benefits. Birds are hardworking allies, eating snails, slugs, and harmful insects. Keep this in mind and feel more generous toward feathered friends.

See our Crows page for specific crow issues.