Farming the Vineyard

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.

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