How do you know your figs are ripe? Well, about a week before they get to the point where you enjoy eating them, right before perfection, exactly at the point where the juice and sugar content soar, the birds will descend on the tree and eat holes in all of them. Figs are ripe when the fruit stops hanging out from the branch and droops downward. I’ll never see it happen if these birds continue with their voracious habits.
Almost-ripe figs
Now I wouldn’t mind if they ate half the figs, and left me half. Birds aren’t like that. Birds will drill holes in all of the figs. I’m amazed at how tiny finches, barely out of the nest, are bold enough to ignore my cats, ignore me, in fact, even when I’m wielding a broom. These birds, with brains the size of a shelled pea, outsmart me with ease. They stay three inches beyond the reach of my broom, pooping with abandon, and creating a huge mess on my walkway.
There is no rubber snake, pinwheel, pieces of mylar that scares these birds. Huge, aggressive grackles, tiny finches, spotty starlings, rattling doves, curved-beak thrashers and yes, busy hummingbirds, all snack on the figs.
Netting is not the answer, either. The tree is 15-feet high, and between the side of the house and the
Two still-untouched figs
block fence. Part of the tree hangs over into the neighbors yard. It’s overhung by a palo verde and shares space with a grapefruit. To cover the tree with a net, I’d need a lot of netting, a very tall ladder, another person and the ability to affix the next like a hairnet around the whole tree top.
I’ve seen nets in trees and I’ve seen birds fly under them with ease. The trouble is you then have a bird that can’t easily find its way out from under the net. I don’t want broken-winged birds, and I don’t want panicky birds. Panicky birds are destructive, and I’m losing enough figs.
Quinn McDonald is a nature lover who loves fresh fig preserves. She may not get them this season. Quinn has two websites: one for professional training at QuinnCreative.com and her art journaling site at raw-art-journals.com
QuinnCreative 
Maybe you can protect just part of the tree with cotton sheets and leave the rest for the birds.
Then you will all be happy 😉
I can’t do it with sheets, because the tree is big, and I can’t easily “wall off” a section of it. To say nothing about the heat in the trapped area would cook the figs–we are back to having triple-digit degree days. And the birds would get under the sheets. But I can try it with netting. Maybe that would be possible.