Black and White pests!

[Tracebe]

I was hoping someone could give me some advice about keeping magpies off of my allotment? I didn't have a problem last year so have just got strips of polythene tied to a stick for bird scarers - they have worked well until this years babies left the nest. They have pulled off 12 of my 16 sweetcorn, 4 of 8 pakchoi, pulled up 3 swiss chard,
2 runner bean plants and even nipped the green stalks from 5 of my well grown
onions! I have had rattling bottles on a cane for the past four days
and thought that was working until I found more broken off onion
tuesday afternoon. Do you have any words of wisdom please?

On another note .......damn weather :0(

[Glutton4...]

A very large net!

Seriously, I think you'll have to net everything.

[dominic10]

I use old CDs and find this quite effective - if they tap against something this helps too. But netting or a cage of some sort would be more effective for you I think. We're really meeting some extraordinary problems this year.

[snohare]

Magpies are members of the corvid family of birds, they are pretty close to Einsteins in their field. The younger generation are perfectly capable of learning novel behaviours their elders did not.
Their cousins the crows can count how many people enter a vehicle and how many leave, and work out that there is someone left inside. They can furthermore tell the difference between a stick and an actual gun barrel, so they know if said individual really is a threat when the window winds down...!
Whatever you do, you will have to keep changing it, because they will learn.
White fluttery strips of cloth maybe don't have the same alarming effect on magpies as they do on other birds - white is usually the same to birds as a flashing amber light is to us, but then again magpies are partially white, so they grow up with it !
I'd suggest the likes of the old Chinese bamboo bird scarer if you have water and space, failing that shiny, reflective windchimes/CD's may be a random enough noise and/or visual oddity to deter them. They won't like being unable to hear predators, or having something unpredictable going on in their field of vision - the only question is, how long will they take to get used to it ?
I use the likes of baker's plastic trays to cover small seedlings to begin with, then progress on to shopping baskets, and raised frames with netting, Enviromesh or fleece. Works fine, but then I don't have magpies...yet !

[Tracebe]

Thank you all for your replies! If this weather continues I wont need to worry about any crops at all - plot resembles a paddy field ..... rice anyone?

[snohare]

RICE ? !!
But winter is coming on Tracebe...it won't work. It would be a rice against time !

Saw what I think was a rat at the lottie on Tuesday. At the same time, I am reading about how councils are getting inundated (pardon the pun ) by calls for pest control as sewers flooding lead to rats coming aboveground.
Could it be that someday soon we allotmenteers will return to the earliest days of agricultural history...actually liking cats for their predatory activities ?