Including birds damage control in a permaculture design

Hello permies,

I am finally doing a design of my garden, after several years of experimenting things here and there.

I noticed this year that I had damages from birds. Sometimes, I had plants that were literally unrooted, and of course if I didn't catch it immediately they would die in the sun.

I also added mulch to some beds and containers, only to have birds suddenly go in there and dig up everything, unrooting plants and just destroying everything.

So far, I have added some jute fabric with holes in it for the plants in container, and a bird net above the mulched growing bed. However, I want to know as many way possible, that do work, to keep bird damages to a minimum, especially since I will also have small fruits like raspberries at some point, and I don't plan on feeding the local wildlife who already take more than his share from the garden. I tried hanging CD, but the birds don't care. So far, only physical barrier seem to be working, but I am open to any solution, especially ones that don't involve having hideous plastic nets all over the place.

What would be a permaculture way of preventing birds damage ?

Hi Mike,
Do you know what kind of birds are causing the damage? The methods for small song birds would of course be different than say, Canadian geese :)

The solutions that I can think of off hand would be to increase the predators in the area and planting way more than they can eat/damage.

For smaller areas, I wonder if you could use some sort of net made from natural materials for short periods of time when the damage might be the most... just after transplanting or just before things get ripe?

Since you mentioned permaculture design, I thought I would mention things that can be done that are functional as well as pretty.

There are voile bags with a drawstring that can be put over the individual fruit.

Have you tried wind chimes? Lots of them?

What about some flags or wind socks?  Lots of them?

How about some decoys?  Maybe an owl or two?

I am looking forward to all the other suggestions.

Matt McSpadden wrote:Hi Mike,
Do you know what kind of birds are causing the damage? The methods for small song birds would of course be different than say, Canadian geese :)

The solutions that I can think of off hand would be to increase the predators in the area and planting way more than they can eat/damage.

For smaller areas, I wonder if you could use some sort of net made from natural materials for short periods of time when the damage might be the most... just after transplanting or just before things get ripe?

Well, the good side of having a "small" urban garden is that there are no dragon-sized bird attacking my beds.

Basically, the birds are the size of common blackbirds for the digging types, and house sparrow for those attacking and eating my grain (which I forgot to talk about in the OP).

I have about 400 square feet of garden if we look at a map, of course in reality it's smaller; so I can't really put that much more plants. What kind of predators could be increased ?

I use nets to protect the grain, however for beds digging it's the first year I notice this behavior.

Anne Miller wrote:Since you mentioned permaculture design, I thought I would mention things that can be done that are functional as well as pretty.

There are voile bags with a drawstring that can be put over the individual fruit.

Have you tried wind chimes? Lots of them?

What about some flags or wind socks?  Lots of them?

How about some decoys?  Maybe an owl or two?

I am looking forward to all the other suggestions.

Of course, if the protection can have several use, it would be wonderful. Wind chimes could be an idea, it's the first time I'm hearing about this. I am not sure if it would scare the birds though but it could be worth a try.

I've read about fake owls, I could try.

So far, there seems to be less damage, thanks to the jute fabric. But it's not really scalable (or at least, if I can find something else that mean being able to have bigger mulch I'm all for it), and the advantage of jute is also its downside: it's biodegradable, so I won't be eating plastic bits, but I'll have to periodically replace them.