I'm gonna have to declare war

Doe Shooter

Doe Shooter

Active Member
I was looking forward to a great year with my 15 peach trees. The damm squirrels have cleaned me out again. The wife does not want me shooting them, so I started trapping them in January and letting the rich folks with homes on the golf course have the pleasure of their company. Caught a ton of them. Then the
mulberry tree got ripe and it was like I had not put a dent in them. In less than two weeks I went from bushels to nothing. The son in law says I should Rube Goldberg some kind of electric fence. Anybody got a solution?
 
Pen a dog around the trees?

Knowledge of your wife's schedule paired with a .22 or pellet rifle would be another route.

Can you open the area between the trees you want to protect and the rest of the woods? Manage for raptors with a few perch posts or trees.

Try fake snakes or an owl at one end to see if that's effective. Old bike inner tubes look enough like snakes to protect my cherries from birds.
 
They never ever run out, there will always be another squirrel family that comes in lol they are as bad as moles
 
Yes, I agree rats are a big problem and need to be controlled or eliminated entirely. I have found Ramik Green to be a great product - for killing rats.

Hawks are really good, too.
 
X-farmerdan said:
Yes, I agree rats are a big problem and need to be controlled or eliminated entirely. I have found Ramik Green to be a great product - for killing rats.

Hawks are really good, too.
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Naughty naughty. You are teaching us bad tricks. Next thing you will be telling us to mix golden malrin with grape soda and put it out beside the sweet corn patch at night to kill the flies that are raiding the corn.
 
Mennoniteman said:
Naughty naughty. You are teaching us bad tricks. Next thing you will be telling us to mix golden malrin with grape soda and put it out beside the sweet corn patch at night to kill the flies that are raiding the corn.
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A good friend would come to visit me in jail. A really good friend would go to jail with me!
 
I don't think you can keep up shooting them either unless you make it a full time job. I recently had them chew through the wiring on my truck so I declared war. I have conabears, live traps and .22 for those seen in person. Not making much of a dent in them. Poison is probably my next step.
 
20$ fake owl sitting on few of the cages will do the trick for a lot of things. Your real problem is last year was a bumper year for squirrels. But your real issue is not enough winged or four legged predators. Mine solves that issue and have watched many a squireel taken by them.

As to Natives suggestion, another idea would be to watch Christmas vacation, even tho the bag and hammer didn't work so well. But you might watch what happens to Todd by way of Margo. Just saying, watch the wife in your case.
 
Doe Shooter said:
I was looking forward to a great year with my 15 peach trees. The damm squirrels have cleaned me out again. The wife does not want me shooting them, so I started trapping them in January and letting the rich folks with homes on the golf course have the pleasure of their company. Caught a ton of them. Then the
mulberry tree got ripe and it was like I had not put a dent in them. In less than two weeks I went from bushels to nothing. The son in law says I should Rube Goldberg some kind of electric fence. Anybody got a solution?
Click to expand...
Fair warning.....squirrels are territorial and will travel a great distance to return to THEIR territory. More than likely you are simply giving the squirrels a car ride. SHOOT THEM! I know of a couple of folks who trapped easily identified squirrels in different settings and had taken them several miles away after being trapped only to have them return.....
 
It's interesting that a domestic housewife will go to any measure known to man or science in eliminating mice from her home, but suggest the idea of shooting rats that happen to live in nearby trees and she objects vociferously! Even when those tree rats are eating the hard and soft mast we work so hard to grow for our own sustenance, or for other wildlife species, they fail to see how vile those long-tailed creatures can be. I am blessed with a wife who ties flies from squirrel tails, hunts them with her 22 magnum, and even goes so far as to clean/cook them each fall.

Hunting them, even year round, isn't likely to reduce their numbers appreciably. Better deterrents or poison seem to be the only way to get them to leave fruit and nut trees alone.
 
I have given up on fruit trees. Around my place, You have to knock every fruit out of them for the first six or eight years until the limbs get large enough to support a 12 lb coon. Then, at that point in the tree’s life, you have to guard them 24/7 for a month or the coons, crows, squirrels, and possums get everything. I have five, fifteen year old peach trees that I did manage to get six peaches from this year - my personal best. I have six apple trees I have never got an apple off of and two 15 year old plums I have never got a plum off of. I had eighty tomato plants this year in my garden I couldnt pick forty pounds of tomatoes from for canning. My dog wears one of those petsafe wireless collars that lets him only get 100 feet from the house. I have had a bag of peredovik sunflower seed on the fromt porch for about a week and the coons found that and chewed a hole in it. The dog has killed four in the last three nights. I am just proud I dont have bears. The hogs dont bother anything in my gardens.
 
Well run them successive during harvest season, you may not be able to do it legally for pelts at that time but if its the stuff i want vs some nuisance critter, its goodbye critters....
 
Thanks for the input guys. I think if a guy is just low profile he can solve the problem quietly. Like solving the feral cat problem ,S.S.S. I have been wanting some conibear 110's anyway.
 
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