Saturday, January 12, 2013

How would you like these in your backyard?



If you look closely, you will see why we don't want these beautiful birds in our backyard!!

They are in the apple tree.  It wouldn't be so annoying if they ate one apple but no, they take a bite from one and then move on to the next.  Very annoying.



And now they have decided the plums are ripe enough too.

So we scare them away ...
but not very far.
Can you see the apple tree in the foreground?  It is waiting for us to go away so it can resume its rudely interrupted meal.
By the way, they are Rainbow Lorikeets.

4 comments:

Debbie Herd said...

Same here Mary. They attacked the apples last year in January as well. I beat them to the plums last year! A friend of mine made drawstring bags out of op shop curtains. Large trees are hard to net.

Mary said...

Yes Debbie, they are eating ALL the apples. We usually get most of the apples, the ones the possums leave. This year the possums aren't getting a look-in. I have put some of my tulle around parts of the tree - no felting for a while! I don't know if it will have much effect, the lorikeets have bitten through some other plastic things we have put over the apricots - and they aren't ripe yet.
We'l prune the tree differently next year (and hope for rain so we get as good a crop as this year) so that it will be easier to cover.

Glennis said...

Hi MAry
Your post made me smile; they used to do the same to my apple tree in downtown Murrumbeena but, like Debbie, we usually managed to save the plums - most of them. We had problems with possums in the winter as they ate the skins very carefully around the lemons and by the time I found them I had lost my lemon crop.

Mary said...

Hi Glennis, we had a problem with our lemons the year before last (2011). We would find lovely, complete lemons hanging on the tree, with NO RIND. Not sure why it didn't happen in 2012 but we're not complaining. There might be a powerful owl in the area, maybe that's the secret.