For the Birds

Scott’s off to Yakima, WA today [note: which really was Saturday], a good 2-hour trip NNE of The Dalles. He’s returning some bird netting; it’s good to get some money BACK for once. Ever since our first harvest in 2008, birds have been, how shall we say, an issue once the grapes ripen. Never thought they would be, since there are no roosting trees around, it’s just those little darned wings that take them places we forgot about.

That first harvest year we tried a couple things: the intermittent cannon blasts (lasted until the neighbors asked us to turn it off, so we did—it wasn’t working, anyway), and the bird distress call, a microchip of birds in distress, plus the predatory birds causing it. Also had a crazy little rendezvous around Mt. Hood to pick up the chip we needed—for it to work you have to have distress calls of the birds that have taken over your vineyard, like starlings and robins. Somehow we had coastal bird noises on the chips we had borrowed from a neighboring cherry orchardist, and it was soon very obvious that starlings don’t give a rat’s ass about one of their feathered brethren like a seagull calling out in distress: “Too bad for you, brother, there are grapes to eat.” So after identifying which birds in particular had invaded our vineyard, we set off to pick up the chip in the little mountain-like community of ZigZag, just at the base of Mt. Hood, the bird chip people meeting us half-way between their Sisters, Oregon location.

We already knew it might be too late for us, since birds had already found the treasure in our vineyard. The trick is that you must put these calls out BEFORE any of these ravenous monsters find your crop. But we were desperate; there were too many birds, and too small a harvest, getting smaller by the day. Samuel was only 2-months old, and if being new parents wasn’t enough, we were new harvest people, and had this bird issue.

So off we drove, in a newly bought and used Jetta, and me the pessimist wondering when it might break down, before or after we got the chip. If it would be before, I calculated, at least we’d be on a rather well traveled highway, Highway 26. If after, well, we might end up on the news. That’s because we took more of a rather desolate secondary route, Brooks Meadow Road that then turned into Dufur Mill, that followed ridgelines and the watershed that left the mountain, and for many miles at a time we were the only one on the road.

That’s no big deal if there wasn’t a fire raging up on Mt. Hood at that time, the Gnarl Ridge fire, started in August 2008 with a crack of lightening. Nothing better to remind you of an uncontained wild fire is the sweet smell of burning wood, and all the smoke. For when we did our drive, it still had yet to be contained, and wouldn’t be until a month after our trip. So while the fire seemed far enough away, my racing mind had the wind picking up in our direction and us in our Jetta trying to outrun it and well, you can imagine the rest. AND how the birds would get the last laugh. Thankfully we made it around just fine, but the birds still did get that last laugh that year, since, well ensconced in the vineyard, even calls of their own kind under extreme duress wasn’t enough to scare them away.

So now we net the place. We started off first by draping, but there’s too much wind, and now have to essentially create a small canopy that covers the entire 20 acres from end to end. I wish one day we might have tall posts and higher-up protection that Scott can actually walk upright under, like the ones that shelter orchards I’ve seen along one of my favorite small, central Swiss lakes. Every time I’ve been walking there the nets have been present—maybe the netting has been rolled up during winter months, I can’t remember.

Netting an entire vineyard is a rather large investment, but what we would lose to the birds is also rather large, economically. And it’s extra work to roll it out after veraison and then roll it up when it’s time to harvest. But no matter. What we’re doing now seems to have worked…so far. Maybe a few have gotten in at the ends, but that’s better than a whole flock, don’t you think?