Shiny Flashy Bird Frightener Thingees

OK, so we have a lot of things growing in our garden/yard that produce fruits of some sort or another, including tomatoes, strawberries, a peach tree, several pomegranates, and an apple tree that we planted last fall.  The apple is five different apples all grafted together, and one of them was apparently a spring bloomer, and has a fair number of apples on it.  We have lots of tomatoes and peaches as well.

Turns out, humans are not the only critters that like to eat fruit!  I know, right?  I'll wait patiently while you compose yourself.  We lost several of our Early Girl tomatoes and five or six apples to the depredations of those dastardly flying free-loaders known as birds.  Apparently the feral cats are now utterly without redeeming qualities and are now only good at crapping in my yard and pissing on my doors.  They'll get their turn on the vengeance rotisserie at another date.

After some research I determined that birds are afraid of two general categories of things:  things that might eat them and things that they think might eat them.   Surprisingly enough, they are apparently convinced that light might eat them, as they are apparently afraid of shiny flashy things (except ravens and crows, those curious crafty buggers).

Where to get shiny flashy things... where to get shiny flashy things... ah what's this I see before me?  Is that a giant box of CDs that Sara and I no longer want and not even Bookman's will take?  Sure looks to be.  Wait a minute... CDs are shiny on at least one side, and some are so hideous on the other that surely it will frighten even crows and ravens (those crafty buggers).

I have made several versions of shiny flashy bird frightener thingees (pat.pend and copyright) of increasing complexity and pleasing geometry.  The first was just a CD tied to a branch.  I chose the shiny-on-both-sides versions to increase effectiveness.  I figured the wind would blow them about and they would spin and shine and flash.  I did not include a picture here because it's pretty easy to imagine, unless you're a bird, in which case it would simply be a picture of <fly away fly away> and not very illuminating.

Second, I tried the basic tetrahedron, which is four identical equilateral triangles.  I dredged up my ancient geometry skills and used a compass and ruler to divide the perimeter of a CD into six equal pieces, and then chose three as the place where I would drill holes to attach them together.  But wait, you ask: a CD is a circle, not a triangle!  Correct.  The point where I drill the holes is equivalent to the line where the two triangles meet, and the vertices are imaginary (not mathematically, just physically).

Third, I tried an icosahedron (D&D fans know what this is), or a 20-sided polyhedron composed of 20 identical equilateral triangles. This was overly ambitious, so I knocked it back to an octahedron, which was very cool.  I have not calculated how big an icosahedron would be made of CDs would be, but impractically-gigantical-for-a-garden-shiny-flashy-bird-frightener-thingee springs to mind.

Last, I tried to make an off-set hexahedron.  Basically, the idea was to make two tetrahedrons and place them together so there were six sides, but instead of lining up the axes of the base triangles, I was going to twist them 60 degrees.  Turns out that's not really practical for a few reasons, but basically, I would have been better making a cube and hanging it from one point.  So, I made the regular hexahedron, and it works well as a shiny flashy thingee but it's not that aesthetically pleasing.