To keep pesky birds away from his blueberries, veteran farmer Mark Flamm has blared recordings of avian distress calls, shot noisy "bird bangers" from a pistol and ordered an employee to shake a gravel-filled bottle at the sky.
He even went old-school and planted a scarecrow.
"That didn't work," said Flamm, 58, who once lost a fifth of his berries to his feathered foe despite the efforts, "though I got a picture of a bird sitting on the scarecrow."
That's when he called in the falcons.
Starting three years ago, the central Washington state grower hired Vahe Alaverdian of Falcon Force, a master falconer based in La Crescenta, to drive out the flocks of sparrows and starlings that were fattened off Flamm's fields.
Using a hunting technique that some think dates back to the Bronze Age, Alaverdian prompted his raptors to launch into a series of high-speed dives, called "stooping," meant to mimic the capture of winged prey. The maneuvers — not unlike an aeronautical war dance — trigger an innate panic attack in the fruit-munching birds, who are either paralyzed with fear or flee for new surroundings.
The falcons are trained to scare, not snack on, their targets.
"It's amazing. Suddenly all the other birds go quiet because they know they could be eaten," said Flamm, who has seen his crop loss from birds dwindle to around 3%.
In the age-old face-off between farmer and bird, falconry has presented a relatively new way to tip the scales in man's favor.
It's an ancient twist to modern farming, which has embraced technology to resist disease, conserve water and conjure a smorgasbord of expensive hybrid fruit. Yet when it comes to marauding birds, growers have few solutions short of ringing the skies with shotgun blasts.
"There's not much we can do," said Joe MacIlvaine, president of Paramount Farming Co. in Bakersfield, the world's largest grower and processor of almonds and pistachios. "You can't shoot them, and you can't poison them, which aren't great ideas anyway."
One Ventura County strawberry farmer's imperfect answer is riding his bicycle on his farm and sounding its bell. Others use timed propane cannons and firecrackers that can make a tranquil country morning sound like the Battle of Waterloo.
"I give one of my workers a pan and a hammer, and he just pounds away to scare the birds," said John Tenerelli, a stone-fruit farmer in Littlerock, near Palmdale.
Alex Weiser, a specialty fruit and vegetable grower in Kern and San Bernardino counties, has an employee drive up and down his fields shooing away the birds like a come-to-life scarecrow.
Recently, he tried specially manufactured inflatable yellow balloons with reflective silver patches he calls the "evil eye." Hung on the end of a branch, the orbs are meant to spook the burglars in midflight.
Despite all that, some of his best results come from firing a flare gun in the general direction of the airborne offenders.
"Not too popular with the neighbors," Weiser said.
Bird damage is often overshadowed by weather and water as a farmer's chief concerns. But avian pests are a formidable challenge, raising the risk of contamination and costing growers hundreds of millions a year in damaged crop.
Recent research by the U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates that birds peck $49 million away from California's wine-grape industry each harvest, $12.3 million from the state's sweet-cherry growers and $2.6 million from blueberry farms.
In Washington, bird damage cost growers of Honeycrisp apples $26.7 million, blueberries $4.6 million and sweet cherries $31.9 million. Birds, like humans, prefer sugary fruit; it's one reason tart cherries in Washington suffered only $1.8 million in losses.
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