I was wondering if any one has tried this and if you would please share your results. this is a post from GW Florida forum great pictures with the ribbon being used towards end of post
http://forums.gardenweb.com/forums/load/flgard/msg062124422547.html
Sal

Everything works for about 3 days: rubber snakes, CDs, streamers, plastic Owls, etc. After that, the only real solution is bird net. Pretty much you have to make it physically impossible to get to the figs.

Well Sal, so much for the streamers-----I guess we're stuck with bird netting and I hate working with the stuff. If you secure it around the bottom, it's a PITA to pick figs and if you don't, the wind blows it off and the birds get in through the bottom. Oh well, such is life. Maybe a PVC cage to set over the top with bird netting attached, That could easily be lifted off for picking and right back on. We'd have to keep the trees pruned to a certain size, but that's doable. Hey, wait a minute yours have a built in bird cage already, lol. Not Fair!

Our birds were slow learners: The fake Hawk worked for about a week.

Georgia,

If your fig season is 7 days long, you have it nailed. If it is longer than 7 days, you're in trouble. Here, that would be one good week, and a dozen bad weeks.

i didn't even get three days out of things.  my personal favorite was seeing a squirrel eating a nut on the perch next to fake owl.  also, be careful hanging rigid objects (CDs, etc.) in the trees.  as they blow in the wind they'll damage the limbs. 

Hi Tim,

Last year, we made a large frame out of PVC piping and I really like it.  We made what looks like croquet wickets.  The verticals can be unscrewed from the horizontal top bar for easy storing.  It's about 10' square.  We pounded six of those green metal fencing posts into the corners and middle of the fig tree area, which is edged with a border edging of concrete.  The PVC wickets are then fastened to the posts with radiator clamps.  Works great.

This year, we drilled little holes in the PVC in the top, middle and bottom of the verticals and screwed some small, white cuphooks into them so that I can hook the netting up when Mike weed eats the yard and the top hooks are good for hooking up the netting all around the tree, which makes for easy harvesting of the figs and caring for the tree.  It's a larger tree even though we pruned it way back this Spring.  Someone could make many of these wickets for over a row of trees.  The wickets keep the netting from dragging down the branches of the tree.

Don't know if this makes any sense, but it sure makes things easier.  The hook additions work really well and I can push the bottoms of the netting inside of the edging and pull them tight and hook them so that the netting doesn't blow around and it would be more difficult for a critter to get inside of the netting.

Don't know how it would do for squirrels, but the birds stay out.

noss

Thanks Vivian, that sound great. I have to remove the bird netting to weed eat around as it is now. The mower sometimes catches on the netting too. I've got to do something different. I like the idea of the kooks on top.

LOL!  Last year, Mike was weed-eating along the fig tree edging and he caught the netting and it made an unbelievable snarl out of it!  There was no hope of untangling it.  That was the one time he didn't call me out to hold the netting up for him, so this year, I told him I'd like to try the cuphooks and they worked beautifully.  I didn't like standing so close to the weed-eater like that.  Too dangerous.

noss