The Strings That Keep the Birds Off the Ripening Rice

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Walk the path between the rice fields this time of year and you will hear the paddy before you understand it: a soft clatter, like a handful of loose change shaken in a tin, rolling across the green from somewhere you cannot see.

Look closer. Strings run the length of the field, tied to thin bamboo poles stuck into the mud. Along them hang strips of white plastic, old cans, the odd bottle cap threaded on wire. When the breeze picks up, the whole line shivers and flashes. When it does not, someone helps it along.

That someone is usually sitting in a small open hut at the edge of the paddy, raised on stilts with a roof of grass or palm. One end of the string is tied within arm’s reach. Every few minutes a hand reaches out and tugs, and the clatter runs away across the rice like a ripple across water.

Misty Ubud rice terraces at sunrise with an earthen footpath between green paddies and coconut palms

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The reason is in the grain itself. Once the rice heads fill and begin to bow, small brown birds arrive in quick, chattering clouds, hoping to strip a few kernels before the harvest. Weeks of planting, weeding and careful water are riding on these last days, so the field is never left alone. Some farmers stay out from first light to dusk, eating lunch in the hut, a radio playing low, a child sometimes taking a turn on the string.

It is a gentle kind of guarding. No one shouts. Nothing is harmed. The birds lift, circle, settle a field over, and try again later. The farmer tugs again. It is one of the oldest conversations in the valley, and it repeats every season, a few weeks before the sound of the rice letting go at threshing time.

Private villa pool deck in Ubud with warm timber, a still pool and frangipani, looking toward green rice fields in late-afternoon light

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If you would like to see it for yourself, ask the team on your staffed villa Ubud stay which fields are close to harvest. Rice here is planted on staggered schedules, so one paddy may glow gold while its neighbor is still bright green. Go mid-morning, keep to the narrow paths, and smile at the hut. A wave back is almost guaranteed.

For more of the life in the fields, read about the kites that hum above the rice, the water you hear long before you see the paddies and the ducks that cross the lane at six, or plan a morning with our guide to seven rice field walks around Ubud.

Back on the deck that afternoon, you may still hear it, faint and far off over the garden wall: a little rattle of tin in the breeze, and somewhere behind it, a patient hand on a string.