I have a beautiful big cherry tree in my backyard, however I never enjoy the fruit, the birds get to it before I can. It's a very big tree and was already there when I bought the house. I have no clue how to keep the birds out. I love animals and don't want to harm the birds. Does anyone has any idea how to keep birds away from my tree without hurting them?

That depends on how much money you're willing to spend. Bird Gard Has bird alarms with various bird distress calls. Phone number is 800-343-2659; or you can try a Google search for their web site

You could net some of the lower limbs for you and leave the others for the birds. I net my pie cherry trees, but of course, they are smaller.
John S
PDX OR

Owls and snakes. Artificial ones of course. They act like scare crows and really do work.
you will be very surprised at the results. enjoy your fruit

You could also try a hawk decoy. I had some success with one last year. I got it from hawkbirdscarer.com. I used it and an owl.

Joe

The plastic owls are lifelike and really do help.

Here is a cheap and easy solution. Get a spool of black thread, it doesn't need to be thick. Unspool some thread and hold the loose end, throw the spool over the tree, continue to throw the spool over the tree again and again in all different directions.

End results is a web of thread that the birds don't like and stay away from. Good luck!

Perhaps I should withdraw my suggestion. The birds pretty much ignored my decoys, and damaged a bunch of my cherries yesterday. Caught a crow almost sitting on my owl decoy with a cherry in its mouth this morning.

Maybe you can solve this problem using technology, there are a lot of small bird repelers like the BirdXPeller Pro, an electronic bird repeller, that expels birds by blasting them with sound waves. You can locate the manufacturer at bird-x[dot]com.

Good luck!

I used a plastic decoy owl on my Damsons (I suppose the technique will work on cherries). It kinda worked OK. But I still netted the lower branches, this also helps to keep the birds at bay.

Same thing happened to me. We bought a house that had 2 cherry trees. I was really looking forward to eating them and probably within 1 day they were all gone
The only thing that's been suggested to me is a net. They can eat the ones on the large tree, but it annoyed me that they wolfed down the whole lot.

I have the same problem each year but with a peach tree and squirrels. It's amusing watching a squirrel with a peach in his mouth twice his size scurrying along my fence but there are no peaches left for me and my family. Does anyone know if those electronic devices work for squirrels?