Lynden Tribune, September 25, 2009,
by Caleb Breakey
LYNDEN — Blueberry growers are still finding ways to fend off those feisty birds of the air that want to steal berries.
Two strategies are on the upswing.
Recently, a local blueberry grower with about 200 acres of berries under constant siege by hundreds of starlings tested a new liquid repellent product for agriculture that has been approved by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
The grape smell of the Migrate product, formerly called Crop Guardian, repels birds by irritating their mouths. For the aforementioned grower, who received 20 gallons of the Migrate from its manufacturer, success was close to 95 percent.
“The key word of the day was, ‘This looks real promising,’” said Jeff Littlejohn, a neighbor of berry growers who has helped toward bird remedies. “(The birds) quickly learn to go elsewhere.”
Migrate isn’t exactly new in terms of being available. Several earlier formulations appeared and disappeared from the market about five or ten years ago. Results weren’t positive with those.
But now that the repellant has had a bit of a facelift, “new light is being placed upon this product in Whatcom County,” he said.
Littlejohn, who said he’s grown blueberries for eight years without ever really seeing his blueberries, said he heard several Oregon growers speak positively about Migrate, so he tried it out himself.
While he noted that his small-scale test was anything but scientific, he did see positive results, as birds stopped coming by.
“It’s a thumbs up,” he said. “This is really, really good news. Essentially, if you have a 95 percent reduction in bird pressure, and 20 percent of the crop damage of removal, then you do the math and that’s huge savings.”
Littlejohn said while Starlings are more susceptible to a wide variety of non-loud scare tactics, Robins are not. To the contrary, Robins are persistent under all conditions.
“They are just crafty and very tolerant birds,” Littlejohn said.
In other words, even the new Migrate might not be enough.
Jack Kites is the name of a company that offers all kinds of different fake birds that look like kites.
“They fly like real birds,” Littlejohn said. You put them on a pole, they flap in the wind, they dance around, they swoop. In my research, the Migrate product works, but you have to try these Jack Kites. I looked into them. When the wind’s at 2.5 (miles per hour), they start to rise. When the wind is at 4.5, they flap.”
Littlejohn started using the Jack Kites in fields about four years ago.
“We put one up and it just knocked out the presence of birds in the field, and it was instant,” he said. “The next year we put them up all over and it dropped 90 percent. The year after that, we added a few more and we altered where they were located, putting them up, taking them down. It was a very, very good year — extremely low number of Starlings and a small number of Robins.”
Littlejohn is the first to say that growers will never see 100 percent bird reduction around their fields, but if one can reduce the number 95 percent?
“That’s tremendous,” he said. “There’s no single silver bullet. The saying goes ‘you have to throw everything but the kitchen at the birds.’ But I’d say you have to throw everything and the kitchen sink at the birds.
Littlejohn said growers can apply Migrate at berry ripening time and then use the Jack Kites toward the end of the season, or reverse the two.
Karen Steensma, a professor at Trinity Western University in Langley, B.C., is currently working with Kestrel Falcons, learning to train them to go after Starlings and patrol certain areas of fields.
“They’re effective in the Yakima area,” Littlejohn said. “They effectively cover a quarter-mile area.”
