Sharing Cherries with Birds

Birds are useful to cherry trees. they eat caterpillars, aphids etc. But of course they want their share of cherries as a reward and they sometimes take a very big share. To save your share, you have to lure the birds and here's how:

When the cherry tree is still young, just graft one of its main branches with a variety of yellow cherries. My father had succeeded in this transplant using the "Bigarreau Stark Gold" variety on a classic red bigarreau cherry tree. The trick works perfectly, the two types of cherries appear at the same time of the year and the birds only eat the red cherries, thinking that the yellow ones are not yet ripe.

There are other varieties of yellow cherries to try grafting. I know: Yellow Buttner, yellow Dönissens Gelbe, yellow Missens and there are surely others.