Someone wrote the author of the gardening column in the St. Paul paper claiming that he'd taught birds to hunt down and eat Japanese beetles.
He started by catching the bugs, freezing them and then leaving the carcasses near his bird feeders. He says that the birds ate them and after a while started going after the live bugs.
Does this seem at all likely?
His story starts about half-way down the page.
thanks for posting this, it will give me something else to figure out. :)
i can't say it works for sure (we don't do bird feeders here), but as of this morning i started leaving the dead bugs on the stepping stones in the pathways and we'll see if the birds pick up on them.
i think the japanese beetle coloring is very much in the range of colors that birds don't see easily. giving them some practice bugs that they can see sure can't hurt. they're nice fat beetles so other than perhaps for toxic reasons i dunno why a bird wouldn't eat them normally if they could find them. they are a bit tough to get off the undersides of leaves, so it would have to be a fairly persistent bird.
around here there are so many grasshoppers and other bugs it doesn't seem that japanese beetles would be a favorite, but hey, i'll give this a try and see what happens.
up until today i hadn't seen many japanese beetles on the beans, but they decided they really like the edamame soybeans so i picked eight of those plants and squished 'em on the stepping stone. they've been out there two hours now, so when i go out to check the beans i'll see if they are still there...
songbird
Yes. The Maori of New Zealand used to have a system for growing sweet potato (kumara) where they kept trained gulls which picked the bugs off the plants.
songbird wrote: ...
one group of beetles completely gone another group (about 50ft away from the first) is half gone. so something is eating them off the stepping stones. without a camera watching i can't say what...
today's picking jb's off beans gave me one more group on a stepping stone nearer the birdbaths where i could put them out.
songbird
Used to leave them in a pile along the edge of the driveway here too and they would also disappear. Never spotted who took them either. Most common bird noticed in the vicinity was Chipping Sparrow. But could have been a Robin, Blue Jay, House Sparrow, Finch, Starling, Cowbird, Grackle, Chickadee...
I heard an interview several years ago (maybe the Diane Rehm Show) where the gentleman grew roses. He made/bent wire stakes so as to give birds convenient perches along side his roses so birds could better pick bugs off them. He seemed to be convinced that it was working too...
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