A smart solution isn’t necessarily a high-tech one Macduff Everton/NGS/Getty

Bring in the big guns. Magpies are being lured in to help ward off smaller birds that feast on grapes.

Fruit-eating birds like starlings, rosellas and thrushes cause substantial damage to Australian vineyards, in some cases munching through 80 per cent of the fruit.

Farmers try to deter them using balloons that look like predatory birds, gas cannons that let off loud booms, and reflective tape that flutters in the wind. However, the birds soon wise up to these tricks and ignore them.


Another strategy is to cover the vines with netting, but this is labour-intensive, expensive and makes the grapes harder to spray.

Now, Rebecca Peisley at Charles Sturt University in Australia and her colleagues have come up with a cheap, easy, environmentally friendly alternative that halves bird damage to grapes.

In each of six vineyards in Victoria, they installed two wooden perches, each designed to attract large, aggressive birds like magpies and predatory birds like falcons – both of which can scare off small grape-eating birds.

Magpie magnet

In practice, the 5-metre-high perches failed to attract predatory birds, but they did prove popular with magpies. Cameras attached to the platforms recorded almost 40,000 magpie visits to the 12 perches over four months.

Fewer grape-eating birds hung out near the perches during this period. Sections of the vineyard without perches experienced damage to 9 per cent of the grapes on average, compared with just 4 per cent in sections with perches.

“I would definitely recommend the perches because with a very small investment, we saw a pretty good reduction in grape damage,” says Peisley.

Made from cheap wooden posts, the perches attracted magpies as they were high up and exposed, allowing a good vantage point for hunting insects and lizards on the ground, says Peisley. Most vineyards have the occasional low fence post, but these don’t make good hunting perches, she says.

“It seems like a very sensible idea,” says Snow Barlow at the University of Melbourne. “I have a vineyard that is too large for netting and we get lots of damage by sulphur-crested cockatoos, so it would be great to have an ecological solution.”

There is also pressure to find alternatives to gas cannons, which are in common use but can occasionally start fires, says Barlow.

Peisley’s team is now looking for ways to attract predators like falcons, which hunt grape-eating birds. “Putting up natural-looking tree branches may be better for attracting predatory birds,” she says. “And if we can get them in as well, we think we’ll be able to reduce grape damage even more.”

Journal reference: Wildlife Research, DOI: 10.1071/WR17028