When I was a kid, I remember a neighbor who periodically took out his rifle, stood on a hill overlooking his land and shot at crows flying over his cornfield.
“Why do you do that?” I asked him.
“I hate crows, kid, that’s why,” he said, as he put another shell into the chamber.
Pretty drastic, I thought, but then, it wasn’t my corn the crows were after.
Later, as I was growing up, I noticed that people with rifles liked to shoot squirrels, for some reason. They shoot rats for obvious reasons. Sometimes they shoot bluejays because they screech a lot and rabbits have always been favorite targets. They shoot a lot of other small animals and birds, too.
Pretty drastic, I still think.
All of which brings me to the subject at hand – measures to which gardeners resort in order to protect their crops from predators in the air, on and under the ground.
OF ALL the garden gimmicks they employ, perhaps the traditional scarecrow is the most common.
It has long intrigued me as to exactly how effective scarecrows really are, especially when I’ve seen small birds nonchalantly perching on the shoulders of these things or nestling comfortably in their pockets and even in the cocked hats scarecrows wear.
The point is, people who grow crops have to fight off invaders other than insects, most of which have the advantage of being able to fly, see superbly in the dark or somehow have managed to outwit the frustrated gardener.
Take the rabbit, for example. Now there’s a lovable creature most people find simply adorable. They’re almost human say the story tellers.
The big-eyed, long-eared, bushy-tailed animal, peaceful and harmless, seen gnawing away on a luscious carrot is the personification of tranquility. He’s just Irrestible!
After all, isn’t Peter Rabbit one of our cherished childhood buddies? And wasn’t it the Easter Bunny who brought all those goodies?. Doesn’t Bugs Bunny’s “What’s up Doc?” still make us chuckle? And, how do you suppose the Playboy Bunny got his name?
Gardeners will tell you he’s a pirate, a marauder, a cunning, resourceful, sneaky, thief of an animal who scurries with the speed of light, burrows, jumps, hops, gets into the garden, cleans out the lettuce, celery and carrots, devastates the rest of the crop in no time and scampers off before daybreak.
And what does a farmer or gardener do if he doesn’t load his rifle and go crow-hunting, so to speak?
He resolutely puts up fencing, spreads rabbit repellent chemicals, dusts with dried blood (agricultural product) which rabbits are supposed to hate. He buys a lot of chicken wire, sometimes burying it six inches deep to no avail. He might pray a little.
BURPEE MARKETS a scarecrow called “Farmer Fred, the Friendly Scarecrow.” He’s five-and-a-half feet tall, vinyl, inflatable and will flap his arms and legs in the slightest breeze, thus scare birds away from the garden. Or will he?
Whenever I see a picture of Fred, he’s surrounded by kids and they all seem to be having a good time hugging him. If I were a bird, I think I’d soon be friendly with Freddy, too. I certainly don’t think he’d be unfriendly.
But if Freddy doesn’t scare the feathered creatures, there are mirrored disks that whirl, spin all 360 degrees and dance in the breeze. These can be strung across the garden. They swivel on galvanized poles. It may make the garden look like a used car lot, but if it works, that’s okay.
Another inflatable thing you can buy is a terrifying replica of a snake. Birds are supposed to think it is real snake and get scared off. The reptile looks real, all right, maybe too real. One woman told me she forgot she had one in the garden and almost had a heart attack when she came upon it without thinking.
Then, there’s a vinyl-molded great horned owl with large, piercing, yellow eyes. He’s an impressive device that hopefully will ward off whatever it is that doesn’t like owls. The lifelike thing is highly decorative, at least, and I’ll tell you next year if it works because I’ve decided to buy one.
Gardeners can chose from a wide variety of traps for catching crop-damaging pests that are a nuisance in the garden. These are baited and the bait lures them in and the trap door closes automatically. Manufacturers emphasize that these devices are not harmful to children or to livestock.
Depending on what’s eating you or what’s eating your garden, that is, the traps will snare rats, weasels, chipmunks, squirrels, rabbits and moles and such critters, but the garden catalogs don’t tell you what to do with these things once you’ve trapped them.
Now in addition to these devices for trying to scare or snare the intruders, there exists a large array of netting which is draped over your favorite fruit bushes, grapevines and the like. Sometimes people’s gardens look like an obstacle course in the Army’s basic training camps.
Considering all the effort and expense that goes into keeping the integrity of the garden intact, I think that a lot of gardeners find a special joy in walking, working and sitting in their own garden almost as if in reward.
They are the only ones that know where the booby traps are because they installed them. They can walk in their own mine fields with impunity because they know where danger lurks.
