Once again this year I have huge, fat pigeons eating the flower/leaf buds on my plum, greengage and damson trees. This has happened several years in a row now, seriously diminishing the crop and vigour of the trees. I end up with silly tufts of leaf only on the bendy outer ends of the branches with the rest bare, and not much fruit.
It's not really practical to net them, I'd need a huge net. I wondered about spraying some kind of evil tasting concoction onto the trees - chilli? garlic?
Any thoughts??
Air rifle... :-X
Provide another food source, it may detract from the tree.
Stuffed Owl
I've always found grey squirrel a bit bland - adding some pigeon to the pie would be a marriage (corpse bride?) made in heaven...
Cheers.
Ha Ha ;D
I had (apparently locally shot) pigeon breast at a restaurant near us last week with great pleasure, sadly they weren't my pigeons...
I don't know if the ones in my garden read A4A but they haven't been so persistent this year, just some light munching rather than scoffing every leaf they can reach off the entire tree.