A few years ago, I wrote about my battle with marauding robins in our strawberry patch. At the time I was feeling smug because I’d just finished locking the robins out with plastic netting.

Fast-forward a couple of years, and the plastic netting had decayed in the sun to the point where the robins could simply push through it. Fine. We were ready for a permanent enclosure anyway.

We got the wire mesh and steel poles, and then I hurt my back and couldn’t pick strawberries anyway. The strawberry patch turned into a weedy mess, and the robins had their merry way with the remaining berries.

But then, inspiration struck: If I couldn’t pick strawberries from the beds on the ground, why not raise them? Strawberry gutters to the rescue! The berry-enclosure project was revived.

Fast-forward to this spring:

We installed the netting roof just as the strawberries were ripening, and I eyed the enclosure with satisfaction. Conveniently pickable berries; birds excluded. Perfect.

Not two hours later, I glanced out the window and spotted a bird in there.

After a moment’s chagrin, I decided we must have left a gap in the roof netting; or maybe on one of the side walls where the wire mesh overlapped. That should be easily remedied. I went out and battened down the hatches, then headed back to the house secure in the knowledge that my berries were now safe.

Two hours later: Another bird in the enclosure. What?

Out I went again. This time I spent a bunch of time kicking up a ridge of dirt all around the bottom of the walls, surmising that the birds must be ducking (or in this case, Spotted Towhee-ing) under the bottom of the chicken-wire.

Just as I finished that sweat-popping chore, the towhee came back and landed outside the enclosure.

“Ha! You’re outta luck, buddy,” I told him. “No more berries for you.”

As I turned away, a flash of movement caught my eye. In the instant it took me to turn back, the towhee was already perched inside on a berry trough. Taunting me with his reedy whistling laugh, the little bastard.

What the actual f***?!?

I’m embarrassed to admit how many more trips to and from the enclosure (now dubbed The Birdcage) were necessary before I figured out that the nylon roof mesh has larger holes than the chicken-wire. It still excludes fat robins, but the slimmer towhees can slip right through. The towhee figured that out in seconds. It took me several days. Who’s the bird-brain here?

The strawberries are just about finished for the season anyway, and the towhee isn’t as greedy and destructive as the robins; so we’ve decided to deal with the roof problem later. But now the towhee comes over and cusses me out every time I go into his berry patch.

Bird-brains. Sigh.

Book 18 update: Progress at last, woohoo! I’m on Chapter 7, and Aydan has just discovered something unsettling about one of her fellow agents.