Hi brendasue, I use garden cover anchoring pins they are 6" X 1" X 6" you can get them in the lawn and garden section of walmart. I use them on the fence surrounding my garden and they work great - easy to put in and easy to pull out! They are not expensive and they come in plastic packaging and they also come in a plastic resealable plastic container with a green lid :)

We do have robins here and I think the bird I rescued from my netting last year was a robin. I don't know if we have a lot of them though, and they seem to be easily scared by people. I wonder if a fake owl moved around periodically will do the trick. As for perch I think I can manage to provide no perch spot for them. I can get the lower canes up higher (have to do that to deal with the critters anyways) and try to minimize the amount of fruit exposed at the top of the shrubs? I read somewhere that you can spray fruits with grape Kool-aid mixture. Has any of you heard of that?

Carla, I think alabamanicole is having problems with netted berries, which you can't conveniently tie off above ground, so the snakes run into the netting on the ground. The snakes become tangled in the netting because their heads are small enough to fit through the holes but their bodies are too large and they become stuck, unable to move forward or back out. I had that problem too when I covered my strawberries last year to keep the squirrels, birds and, mostly, the damned deer from mowing them down. It was a death trap for lizards, as two or three died before I could cut them out and the remaining lizards ended up as dinner for the only snake that managed to get caught in the netting, a bull snake that my 14 year old cut free and decided to keep for a pet.

I'd like to suggest that keeping berries safe from birds without netting is wishful thinking. Consider how you might rig a support system over the berries so that you can lift up one side of the netting when you need to harvest.