It’s a mesmerizing spectacle to watch a flock of birds as they fly in sync creating moving,  freeform clouds in the sky. In our part of the world it’s starlings that put on the show for us. That type of behavior is called murmuration.

Even though they are an imported species, starlings have become an important feature in our natural landscape.

Scientists have discovered how starlings are able to fly in what seems to us to be in impossible ways. It turns out an individual bird doesn’t need to know what the entire flock is doing; they only need to keep track of the seven closest birds to them. As each one watches its in-flight neighbors, the entire flock can make minor adjustments on the fly.

That’s all very fascinating until you watch them murmurate their way to the grapes you have been nurturing all season.

If left alone, birds can consume an entire crop in one sitting, especially if it is a small crop like mine. I tend only two, 200-foot rows of grapes. That’s enough for a respectable harvest but not enough to share with our local marauding birds. Even growers with acres of grapes can lose a large percentage of their crop to birds.

To keep birds from getting at their grapes, growers and gardeners have come up with different ways of approaching the problem. The one we use here is bird netting.

The idea for netting grapes is to wait until veraison begins. Veraison is the change-over in metabolism that happens when grapes start to ripen. The most obvious sign is the change in color from green to the ripe color of the finished grape. For my concords, the color is purple.

I installed the netting earlier this week, that’s about two weeks earlier than normal. It wasn’t because the grapes are earlier, there’s no sign of the onset of veraison.  And it wasn’t because the birds were bothering them, the grapes have far too much malic acid and not enough sugar in them to be palatable to birds. The problem is the deer in our area that have developed a taste for unripe grapes. Actually, it’s not so much the unripe grapes they’re after, rather they are sampling the fruit by biting into the bunches ruining a lot of grapes in the process.

Putting bird netting over grape vines cuts down on the amount of light reaching the leaves. Less sunlight means less photosynthesis, less photosynthesis means less sugar production.

White netting cuts sunlight by eight percent; green netting by 12% and black netting cuts it down fully 14%. I use a sturdy, tightly woven black netting so I know there is a significant shading  going on. As a result of the shading effect, veraison will be delayed and my brix count, the sugar content of the grapes, will definitely be lower.

That’s still better than losing my unripe grapes to deer and whatever ripening grapes left over to the murmurating birds.

Installing the netting involved some effort. It took about an hour for two of us to drape, roll and tie the netting covering a row two hundred feet long.

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