Hey Everyone,
So I walk out to my backyard today and I see this bird fly out of my ghosh plant (in container).  I start looking at other brebas and I have noticed my crop of king has shrunk about 40% and the ghosh has missing figs too.

Is it possible the birds want the unripe figs?  I heard birds are more fond of yellow/green figs and basically avoid the dark ones.  I netted them and even built a scarecrow! 
I noticed Jon mentioned to wait to net until they start to ripen, but I fear that if I wait, it will be the end of Kings season-already.  Is there a reason I should wait?  I used half inch...
Maybe its squirrels?

Thoughts?

thanks!

I have a pet squirrel too.
He's been known to nibble on my unripe figs as well.

These plastic nets are useless with squirrels.

I think this year I will have to teach him a lesson.

Been thinking about buying one of those plastic owls with the moving head.
If that doesn't work then there's a 12ga. in the house.

Not sure whether birds  feast on green unripe figs. However late last summer I had some problems with little sparrows. They were shading themselves as well as feasting on MVS, D.Portuguese & HC. The figs were turning color & they were gone or pecked. I have see them sneaking in & out the pots recently. Well, I hope to put an end to that shortly by building a net around the pots. The birds are smart. I saw many walking into my friends net enclosure for blue berries. My bro recently hang some disc to deter the birds off his Negronne successfully. The reflection from the disc seems to deter the birds.

In my big trees I use the big plastic owls with the rotating heads and sparkly eyes. The only problem is that I have to move them every day or the birds get used to them and dont' frighten them off. My main bird predator is mockingbirds. It's a pain in the neck moving the stupid owls every day, but it helps a lot. I have them stuck on long pieces of e.m.t. pipe and I stick the pipe in the ground so it looks like the owls are sitting in the trees.

I found big plastic hawks a few months ago, with glittery eyes. I am eager to put these in the trees as well, to see how they work. The squirrels decimate my pear tree every year, so maybe I can put a hawk in the pear tree and see if it works.

If you use a net, your net must either tie around the trunk or extend to the ground and be weighted down.  In Houston, I found nothing else worked... I've tried foil, CDs (do not use, they will damage your trees), mylar tape, plastic owls (a personal favorite was after I moved the owl, I saw a squirrel sitting on the same perch eating an acorn), plastic snakes... even the feral cats sleeping under the trees do not seem to keep the birds and squirrels out of the trees.

~james

Hah, a couple of kids down the road stole the blow-up snakes out of my fig trees several years ago. Really, I wan't too upset, because I never got used to seeing the snakes, even though they weren't real, and I'd see them and scream two or three times a week.

30 years ago I worked as a reptile keeper for a medium-sized zoo. We occasionally got calls from people with snakes in their yards, wanting to know if they were dangerous. One such call concerned two large snakes a man had spotted while looking over his fence into a neighbor's  garden. I asked him to describe them to me, and when he did, I figured he was a prank caller, because no snake in that region matched the descriptions. Then his out-of-breath wife returned from having gone next door to warn the neighbors, and informed her husband that they were just inflatable snakes set out to scare the birds away. We all had a good laugh over that one.

As far as being a way to protect figs, in my experience many birds will actually approach snakes (as well as owls and hawks) quite closely, to harass them and try to drive them away (a behavior known as "mobbing"). My guess would be if the plastic critters were realistic enough to fool the birds, you might end up with even more feathered friends in the yard (or nosy neighbors peering over your fence)!

The only ways I've found to reliably keeps birds from eating my figs are bird netting "tents," covering individual branch ends with fabric sleeves, or putting little newspaper covers over individual figs and clipping them in place with clothespins.

Nas,

If the fig disappeared, I doubt it is a bird. They eat them on the tree, and there is almost always some evidence or remnant of the fig - at least a stem. And I seldom, if ever, see them eating an unripe fig. They may sample one and discover that they are unripe, but don't eat whole unripe figs, and you would have an obvious "sampled" fig still on the tree..

Is it possible that the trees just dropped the brebas?

I have never had anything eat an unripe fig, and our birds generally prefer the darker colored figs, mostly leaving the green/yellow varieties alone in favor of the darker ripe figs.

Do what you can, but as I so often tell myself, there's always next year.

Best wishes to all.

John
Georgia Piedmont
Zone 7b

Hello All,

I tried the CDs on the tree--all over the tree.  The mockingbirds laughed.  They are thugs and are not afraid of anything that I can tell, anyway.  They probably admired themselves in the shiny CDs.  I put bird nets over the trees themselves and it compacted the leaves so that they got rust earlier in the season than if not netter. 

Last year, my husband and I built PVC frames to put around the tree.  They look like huge croquet hoops.  The tops are screwed onto the upright poles so that they come apart for storage and the uprights are lashed onto metal fenceposting with radiator hose clamps.  The posting is at the four corners and in the middle of the fig tree enclosure.  So, there are three of the PVC hoops.  The bird netting goes over that and I let the bottom of the netting pool on the ground inside of the brick edging around the tree.  The birds are baffled by that extra netting.  The bird netting I use catches onto everything, literally.  I got shirt buttons caught in it and couldn't get free without cutting the netting away, so I wear a housecoat with snaps to harvest the figs.  The birds really don't like it.

However!  If the wind blows the netting aside from my not having hooked it down well enough--The little feathered thugs are inside the netting in a heartbeat.  LOL!  They are rascals.  They've already been getting into the tree, scoping out the figs to see if they are ripe yet.  The netting goes up this week.

Vivian

The bottom line on birds is this: anything works, rubber snakes, CDs, plastic owls, etc. etc. -------- for about 2-3 days, and then the novelty wears off, it isn't seen as a threat, and the birds go back to eating with impunity. The only true solution is bird net.

To start my fig scions I built a 4x8 covered cage made of black pvc covered chicken wire on a wire frame and then secured it all around firmly to the ground by pounding in long wire hooks.

I built it to keep armidillos from digging in the bed and ruining the rooting figs.

It has worked great in keeping out everything, except one morning there was a young about half grown Mocking Bird INSIDE the cage.  I honestly have no idea how he got in there, but I let him out and then tried to stop thinking about how he could have gotten in there.  They are magicians apparently.

So my next plan is to defeat the Mocking Bird mauraders is to use over-whelming numbers: I am planting about 70 fig trees in the orchard, so either I'm still going to have a lot of figs despite the local Mockingbirds, or the Mockingbirds are going to have to call in some serious reinforcements!  ;-) 

Georgia, My money is on the mockingbirds. ;-))

You may very well be right my friend, but I will fight them to the last fig!

;-)

Best wishes.

John
Georgia Piedmont
Zone 7b

Thanks for the advice everyone.

Jon, I guess it could be a squirrel, but I found they dont usually mess with the potted figs.  I know they didnt drop on their own because I am with my trees every day for a least an hour and would notice brebas on the ground.  Jon, you mention that they would leave a remenent of the fig , ie. a stem, but I am thinking they would pull by the stem easily taking the entire fig off.

I netted the ghosh and king and built a scarecrow.  The robins are not scared, but I dont think they were the ones in my trees.

We will see, hopefully I have so many figs I dont mind sharing...
Nas

Nas, Maybe Canadian birds are different, but here they always eat them on the tree, very seldom eating more than 1/2 the fig, but always just enough to ruin them.

Nas I agree with what Jon wrote I had some birds peck at my Bronze Paradiso fig last year and they would just eat little bits of the fig but leave the fig on the tree. With that being said the two worst pests to steal figs are Rats & raccoons even though my Paradiso was jailed up those buggers would still get in and out with my figs. After setting rat traps and my dads Pitbull taking care of one of the raccoons never had anymore issues that season.

In times of drought (and even in times of no drought) birds, squirrels, possums and raccoons will go after green (ripe or unripe) figs.