Early this morning I looked out the window at the sunrise and noticed my pea vines were trembling. As I looked more closely I saw a startling sight. The vines were filled with little birds with white stripes on their heads. Sparrows! We grabbed the binoculars to see what they were doing and saw they were nipping and eating the tender leaves...and there were LOTS of birds! Who said gardening is not exciting? This morning marked the beginning of the war against the sparrows.
What to do? We first sent the dog out to scare them away but that didn't last long. They were soon back. I remembered I had put bird netting away somewhere, but couldn't remember exactly where or IF we had used the entire roll. Ace Hardware was not yet open, so we just threw a sheet over the entire trellis. As we planned further strategy, we decided bird netting was not the answer. The vines would grow into the netting and make harvesting the peas difficult if not impossible. We were sure, though, we could find something at the hardware store to deter the birds. They did have some whirligigs but they were too small. AHA! In a dusty corner of the store, we found a blow-up owl...billed as a " natural enemy scarecrow " as seen on CBS,NBC and CNN news...over 2,000,000 sold! How could we go wrong?
We'll let you know!
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