UMass Extension Gives Advice on Keeping Your Backyard Berries Safe from Birds with ‘Outdoor Guide’

Content

If you’ve ever grown berries, you know it can be a time-consuming process, requiring patience and love. But you also might know the feeling of waking up with berries that have vanished from the vines. If this happens, birds may be the culprit—“berry bandits,” as some call them. Luckily, there are cheap and interesting solutions to deterring these plumed plunderers. 

Outdoor Guide looked to the team at UMass Extension, a program dedicated to bringing research to local communities to aid agriculture, for advice on how to discourage birds from stealing our hard-earned berries. According to UMass Extension documentation, a packet of grape-flavored Kool-Aid should do the trick. The secret in the Kool-Aid is methyl anthranilate, a compound found in most artificial-grape-flavored foods that birds do not seem to like.  

Mixing the grape-flavored Kool-Aid with water and spraying it onto the berries should keep the birds away once they get a taste of the methyl anthranilate. If you’re worried about now having grape-flavored berries, simply rinsing them off after harvest will remove any Kool-Aid residue. 

Learn more about protecting your berries from birds in Outdoor Guide.