Another strawberry with a hole in it.

No one here has ever said that Roly Poly's, Pill bugs, Sow Bugs, Potato Bugs, Wood Lice, or what ever else you call them would not eat strawberries or any other plant. What was stated is that they are not the primary cause of damage done. Something else started eating what is being eaten and these cleaner uppers are coming in to finish the job.
If these wee buggers are eating your strawberries something else started that so the Roly Poly's are not your primary problem.

I know the birds are a big culprit, but there are many times the roly polies are all over my strawberries that touch the ground. The birds don't really get those. They get the strawberries that are higher and more visible. What could be causing the initial damage, if not the roly polies?

Rpost.....kimmsr will always be a naysayer about these little guys. Most of us know that they are very happy to take that first bite....be the first at the dinner table. And in an environnent such as a strawberry bed, they can readily be the primary pest.

The fact is, these little animals can fullfill both beneficial AND pest roles in the garden. If I started seeing them around my strawberries, however, I'd be very suspicious of their motives, lol. They're there to eat strawberries, not to clean up after somebody else.

That's definitely been my observations so far. There's a VERY healthy population in my strawberry patch. I don't typically like to kill anything. I've so far remained organic. The birds and roly polies are the only things I've seen eating my fruit. I've went to pick up a strawberry and literally 10 or more roly polies will be snacking away. Is there any safe way to thin the population?

What about slugs, for one? Often it is "out of sight, out of mind".

I haven't seen any slugs anywhere in my yard, ever. I know those guys like to come out at night and when it's raining. I do get snails in my yard, but I've never seen them in my strawberry patch, or on a strawberry. I know if like to get some strawberries this year that aren't half eaten!

I have observed plowbug damage to be the worse in the parts of my strawberry bed with the densest foliage. It seems perhaps if one creates an ideal environment for the pest and then furnishes it with a buffet it will indulge to no end. I'd guess the plowbugs like that relatively cool, shady, moist environment of dense strawberry foliage. It would help to only water the berries, if you don't use drip, in the morning or heat of the day when the foliage will dry out the quickest leaving the polies less time to be in their comfort zone. Deep straw mulch which dries on it's surface where the berries rest helps too with the polies and fruit disease (botrytis).

As far as who came to the table first, my berries are covered netting keeping out the pesky Robins that do like pecking berries. Long ago I watched a mother robin bopping down my bed showing her 2 offspring how and where to peck berries one at a time. Dang it, why don't they just eat the whole darned thing instead of taking a peck out of each one!!! That's when I got bird netting and it works very well.

I do still get a bit of polie damage on the deep straw, it is worse on wet years like this one. Last year was drought and with the drip system there wasn't diddly for polie damage.

I've been dealing with pillbug problems for years in my strawberry patch. I've spent countless nocturnal hours with a flashlight verifying who is the actual culprit. I don't care how many people try to tell me it is not the pillbugs who are the main culprits, I've seen enough first hand evidence to make up my mind on the issue. Yes, occasionally an earwig or a slug will join the pillbugs for dinner, but overwhelmingly the pillbugs do way more damage.
That being said, I am happy to announce that I've found what appears to be a great solution. Baby ducks! This year we obtained a dozen baby muscovies, who quickly learned that pillbugs loved to take cover in the strawberry patch. They spent hours searching out every last one of them, and they could care less about the strawberries themselves (unlike the adult ducks that annihilate both green and red strawberries). It has been about three weeks now, and now I am hard pressed to even find a pillbug in my yard. Previously we were infested with them, they were under anything that laid flat on the ground.