Sheri,
We are on the edge of a rain forest, so every once in a while we are invaded by Cockatoos
The cockatoos love to eat passion fruit, and make a general mess of any fruiting plant, but just the other day they came in and landed on the Giant Russian Sunflowers that were towering 8 feet tall, knocked them to the ground and completely bit the sunflower heads right off. There were no seeds yet so they just destroyed them. Even the smaller sunflowers they knocked the tops off! We also lost some corn, and some other fruiting plants.
The sunflowers are just to attract bees as we have 7 beehives, plus we would like to give the seed heads to the chickens when they where finished seeding.
There is a fence around the entire garden, it is just attack from above!
originally my design was to have full bird/bug netting, but it is a bit of a financial commitment, and we were not ready for that just yet.
The earthworks alone have been a little costly. Just today we finished a new small dam, raised the dam wall on the top dam and changed the spillway to run from the big dam to the new smaller dam.
On the papaya circles, I honestly have zero experience in that department! I have had success with papayas growing, but never in a papaya circle. With the bananas/papayas we are doing horseshoe shaped circles to catch water from the garden and water coming from downhill. As large as the papaya canopies get here we just figured no more than 3 per circle, so they were not as large as the banana circles. Honestly it is a hunch, and not from experience that they were to be smaller. Even if they were for bananas they would only hold 3.
We already planted 30 banana plants so the new ones we dug were smaller.