“We’re expensive, but we gain efficiency each year, once we’ve told the pest birds it’s a bad neighborhood,” says Blankenship. Sky Guardian’s services cost between $600 and $1,000 a day, depending on the needs of the vineyard and its size, and one falconer can work several hundred acres at a time. The difference between us and everyone else is, we are not bluffing.”Īccording to an article in Living Bird citing research by Sara Kross of Columbia University, “the presence of falcons in a vineyard was associated with a 95 percent reduction in the number of grapes removed by birds and a 55 percent reduction in the number of grapes pecked,” saving farmers up to $326 per hectare (or $132 per acre). Air cannons are loud, so it’s like a dinner bell that calls the flocks in, because they only use them when the fruit is ripe. As Blankenship puts it, why mimic the sound of a predator when you can use the real thing? Netting is effective, but can be labor-intensive and pricey, while air cannons and bird screamers can only accomplish so much. Most vineyards in the United States handle bird pressure with tools like netting, air cannons and bird screamers, which mimic the sounds of birds of prey. You have to be all in if you commit to being a falconer.
“I’m a strategist, I’m a quarterback, I’m a trainer and I’m a coach. “Using natural predators to control a pest versus buying plastic bird netting to do the same job seemed like the obvious answer.” “This year, our season was running about three weeks behind and I decided the falconer route seemed like it was worth trying,” says Adelsheim’s vineyard manager, Kelli Gregory. īecause of how late the grapes ripened this year, the “bird pressure” was poised to be particularly high, leading well-known wineries like Adelsheim to bring Sky Guardian on board. In the past, major alignments of bird migrations have caused growers in Oregon’s premier winegrowing region, the Willamette Valley, to lose well over half of their crop. And voracious flocks of birds that can number in the tens of thousands, waiting for their chance to pillage. Temperatures that are too hot or too cold at the wrong times. An infinite array of things can threaten grapes in a vineyard.
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