I just got assistance in the constant battle with birds and squirrels. A Cooper's Hawk began swooping through my yard this morning. Hopefully, he likes the area and stays. That should definitely help later on when the figs ripen.

Great!  Leave out food for him.

If you have a small dog (or cat) keep him inside. What was thought to be a Coopers cleaned a local community of small dogs here a few years back.

Wonder if you can keep one in a cage for a few months like pigeons and then release it?
By then it will be used to its' place and stay for good,,,, hopefully.

Send one my way John.

I want one, there are so many stray wild cats around here.

This guy was in my garden in 2011.

Cooper's hawk are amazing birds and are specialist when in comes to catching other birds. Their manueverability while on the hunt is great to watch.

see I got you covered. I called in the air support.

amazing hawk flight manuervers 

My Coopers is useless. He perches on the bluebird house and waits for earthworms in the garden to surface. He is totally unafraid of me and lets me get within 5ft or so. I think he may be a rescue bird. Here is the real air defense. Stupid crows try to chase him off though...

I had air support of a different nature today. One very smart, or maybe not so, mocking bird found it's way into my fig cage. While he was frantically trying to find a way out when he saw me, he attracted the attention of another one which kept chasing the one on the inside from one end to the other while he was on the outside. Then came the air support.



The results of the sortie.



The one on the left was a head shot as that was all he was presenting me and the other right through the heart and lungs. No suffering was involved.
"gene"

Then I tried this last year but I could not afford the $24,000 per hour per plane flight cost.

It's a beautiful bird. I've enjoyed watching it so far.

Hi, I am new here. I have a two acre orchard in Coastal California. The only thing that I have found that has been very effective for me against birds is the Bird Gard:

http://birdgard.com/Home/

I had a bird watcher come to my house and identify the birds and then I had Bird Gard make a custom chip that would sound like the predator birds of my area and distress calls of the birds that were eating my figs. Without bird Gard my losses were about 80-90% of the crop. With Bird Gard the losses were much less than 50%. All of the other things that I tried were labor intensive or didn't give good results.

Hope this helps. Has anyone else tried the Bird Gard?

PS: regarding squirrels I have suffered with them for years and in the last week, I am on to something.  I have gotten rid of ten of them just this week by using  Victor Black Box Gopher traps.

@ fmc2009,

They probably were armed with Sparrow missles!