North American Fruit Explorers mailing list at ibiblio

[Scott Smith <scott@cs.jhu.edu>]

In this past year I had no success with either bonbons or tube  
trap.    I put out about a hundred bonbons and saw no observable dent  
in the squirrel population.  After some time the squirrels stopped  
eating them, only the birds were eating them.  The squirrels decided  
they preferred peaches and tomatoes, or maybe they somehow figured  
out the bonbons were "unhealthy" :-)   At that point I stopped  
putting any more out.

I have one of those tube traps and while I have not had it long, I am  
finding it hard to set well, it will not trigger unless you set it  
just right.  I have not completely written it off yet since my  
experience is limited, but it doesn't seem to be any better than any  
other trap.  I did manage to catch quite a few squirrels this year in  
Havahart traps and with squirrel poles (snares attached to a pole),  
and also with the pellet gun.

One thing I have learned in a few years of squirrel hunting is to pay  
attention to what they are eating.  They are most easily culled when  
they are the most hungry; if there are plenty of peaches or nuts they  
are harder to entice into a trap.  In my neighborhood, they go from  
mulberry season to peach season to nut season; in each of these  
periods they are harder to trap.  This is a bit of a gap between each  
of these three seasons when things get easier.  I plan to do more  
late fall through early spring trapping because I expect they will be  
much more hungry then.

Scott


Spidra Webster wrote:
> > I don't believe the little peanut butter and Plaster of Paris 'Bon
> > Bons' work very well - if at all!
>
> That's too bad.  I thought those were a pretty clever invention.
>
> I don't mean to plug CRFG/The Fruit Gardener so much, but this list
> and CRFG are where I get most of my fruit-growing info from.  Since
> I'm still very much a novice, I like to chime in where I can so that
> I'm giving and not just taking from this list.
>
> The Sept/Oct 2007 issue of The Fruit Gardener has a letter from a
> member that tells of a squirrel trap he bought that was quite
> successful. He bought 3 Tube Traps from Forestry Suppliers, Inc.
> After a couple months, he'd depleted the local population enough that
> he could start harvesting decent-sized ripe fruit again without the
> competition.