When I first moved in here, south east Queensland, 25 years ago, I planted a small orchard in part of the house paddock. I also started feeding the birds, up to about 50 a day demanded their handout. Mostly lorikeets, blue-headed honeyeaters, butcher birds, magpies & topknot pigeons, but quite a few smaller ones as well.

I had tropical peaches & apples, a few citrus, apricot & blue & white mulberries mostly, but also passion fruit on the fence, Brazilian cherries & dragon fruit completed the picture.

After a few years the fruit fly arrived, & I was using too much pesticide to control them. With the cost of expensive water, fertiliser, the poisons were the last straw. The crows were getting the lemons, the magpies the mandarins, various the mulberries & the lorikeets would eat the half grown apples, leaving just the core hanging on the tree. If I was going to have to use poisons, I might as well buy my fruit.

I ripped out all but a large Mulberry for shade, some passionfruit, the dragon fruit that nothing attacked, & Brazilian cherry. These fruit on the hardwood, hidden away behind the foliage, & the birds haven't found them. The kids loved the new lawn area.

Yesterday the honey eaters found a way to attack the dragon fruit, destroying a dozen almost ripe, & the white cockatoos stripped the passion fruit bare.

Enough is enough, my bird café is closed.

Hassy no SUSTAINABILITY another example of mans failure to live in harmoney with the enviroment! Get rid of all that introduced foreign rubbish joint the Greens and find earth people who can put you in touch with nature before it is to late.

The birds were neither your friends not your enemies. The trees you planted were just a resource to them. They survive by being smart enough to learn how to utilise new resources even the ones you thought were hidden away. You survive by being smart enough to outwit them. For small home orchards with just a few trees, bird netting is quite effective.

Cossomby above is right.

All your fruit, except for the mulberries are unsuitable for sub tropics. Star apple are worried by anything, Persimmons too :-)
Cheers

A small addition. If you started feeding the birds regularly when you planted the orchard, you were actually training them up to come to your property for food. So down the track when the orchard started producing fruit, well...
This is a standard procedure for dealing with pest animals, using poisons like 1080 - lay out unpoisoned carrots, oats etc. then when you've trained the pests to come, provide poisoned food. I'm not suggesting you should have poisoned the birds, just that you were using a well-known technique, and should not have been surprised at the result.

Not surprised, except for the dragon fruit. I'll obviously have to pick them a little earlier, before the birds are attracted to them by the ripe smell.

The birds aren't too bright. They were onto the blue mulberries, but it took 5 years for them to realise the white ones were eatable.

It is rather nice having them come when you walk outside, rather than flee, & the grand kids like the birds more than the fruit, so I'll probably keep the café open.

Fool on hill, the tropical apples are very successful, producing as well as southern varieties, & the tropical peaches ripen before the fruit fly appear each year so very successful here actually.