Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

My situation: I have 3 semi-dwarf apple trees in my front yard and am otherwise surrounded by mature hardwood forest. My nemesis's are squirrels and birds - woodpeckers, primarily. The woodpeckers open the fruit up, then myriads of other birds move in to feast on the opened up fruit. Some years the squirrels are the worst, sometimes it's the birds. This year it's the birds. I knew the birds were doing some damage but I completely underestimated how much. Looking from below, the fruit looked like it was still intact. I happened to move around and saw that they had been doing massive damage from above and had about half of the entire crop of apples hollowed out. In panic mode, I stumbled upon this stuff. My deployment: The scare tape arrived quickly and I got right to stringing it. I have no idea how they expect you are supposed to deploy this stuff. I have seen pictures of it draped through the trees and others where it was cut into strips, then each strip hung from an individual limb. Cutting into strips seemed way too much work, so what I decided to do was run a continuous strip through each tree, concentrating on the areas of surviving fruit. I left a lot of loose loops along the way so in the event of heavy wind, the tape wouldn't start tearing the fruit off. The loops also tend to flutter in the breeze, making for a better deterrent. Long strips would also allow for much easier removal & storage after harvest. Next, I erected 2 poles and strung a wire between them running along the entire length of the tree row. I then cut strips of scare tape to a length that could flap freely in the breeze without getting hung up on anything, and tied them to the wire, spaced equally. My results: I've been using the scare tape for about 3 weeks and the birds are absolutely, completely gone! It went from hundreds of bird visits per day (every few minutes from dawn to dusk) to zero. I have not seen a single bird in those trees from the moment of deployment and have not lost a single additional piece of fruit to bird strikes. Not only that, I have not had a single loss to squirrels either, which was completely unexpected. However, we have 2-3 weeks more til harvest so there is still some time to have squirrel problems - time will tell. Why I think it works: Birds are very sharped eyed - that's how they make their living. The effect of this stuff when it's in direct sunlight is dazzling, particularly when the wind blows, which covers a good portion of most days. But even when it's cloudy or the wind isn't blowing I think this stuff makes it particularly hard to acquire their targets - a mirror is brighter than a dull apple under almost any conditions. In addition, the pieces I have blowing on the wire (it takes an almost imperceptible low wind speed to get them fluttering) make a constant rustling sound that is sure to overload their next most sensitive sense - hearing. Trying to listen for predators isn't going to work, so time to scoot. Some ideas for enhancing the performance: 1) Cut narrow strips of the scare tape and mount them in front of a blowing fan like they have on fan displays in the store. Oscillating fans would even be better. A raft of surplus computer cooling fans would be cheap and effective. 2) Add strobes. DaBaay sells 12v led emergency strobe light bars for cars relatively cheap that can be broken apart into individual units and mounted on rebar driven into the ground so that you'd have many bright flashing lights coming from every direction to reflect off the tape. See the attached pictures for my deployment. BTW, I also installed some of those "giant eyeball" bird repellers but they are almost always turned the wrong way to do any good and, in any case, I have absolutely no faith in them providing any long term relief anyway.