Outsmarting A Pea Brain

It has been more than a month since I spotted a social media post about painting rocks to look like strawberries. According to the unsubstantiated post, rocks painted like strawberries need to be scattered out in the patch before the berries start to bloom. The birds see the rock berries and try to peck at them thus realizing that they are not edible. Once the real strawberries start ripening, the birds will associate the berries with the unappealing rocks and will not peck at the berries.

While doing chores, or weeding the flower bed, or when down by the river, I have been on the lookout for strawberry shaped rocks. In the beginning, I was fairly picky, only choosing small rocks that had a true berry shape. Then, I started picking up more oddly shaped rocks so that I could paint some leaves or crowns on the top. A little later on, I found some more flat rocks that seemed like they had a good outside line, and some more that were quite a bit bigger than what a real strawberry would be.

Picking up rocks got me to thinking that I am not a very artistic or crafty type of person, so I started judging just how much effort is going to go into a DIY project like this.

Questions started to arise.  Just how close a likeness to strawberries do the decoys need to be? I mean, birds have brains the size of peas, for crying out loud, how hard would it be to fool them? Can they recognize 3-D? Do the rocks need to be rounded or can they be flat? Do they need to have green leaves also? Do I need to detail the strawberry seeds on the red paint? How big can the rocks be and still trick those pesky peckers? Do I even have to paint them?

Hey! That’s an idea, maybe I could  just throw the unpainted rocks into the strawberry patch. Would that have the same deterring effect?  Now I am terribly sad. For years and years I have ‘harvested’ rocks out of the garden as I tilled the ground, raked the rows, planted vegetables and pulled root vegetables to get the rocks out of the way. I have nearly smoothed out every puddle in the driveway with my garden rocks (it is a still an ongoing project).

Now where was I? Back to the story, all this wiffle-waffle about rocks, painting, and fooling the robins and jay birds (Stellars Jay), has got me to thinking that the birds may have already won this round of garden protection.  Maybe my fair feathered fowl have one-upped me on this project before I even get started. Well played, bird brains, well played.