North American Fruit Explorers mailing list at ibiblio

["Alan Haigh" <alandhaigh@gmail.com>]

 

Dear members, there is no life form that runs as much interference between fruit-set and harvest for me as the common grey squirrel.  At least half the hundred or so orchards I manage have squirrels as a destructive presence.  I do a good job of protecting my own fruit with a shotgun and a watchful eye but at other sites I rely on a combination of surrounding the trunk with a couple feet of roof flashing and 3 or 4" of paste formula tangle trap spread over shrink-wrap.  This has proven to be a helpful deterrent but far from infallible.

 

Sometimes I use stove-pipe or duct-pipe instead of flashing, holding it up by pressing rusty chicken wire between the pipe and the trunk.  This is much harder to do than just stapling flashing onto the trunk. I'm not really sure if it is harder for squirrels to get up this but I know that they somehow have.   What both kinds of metal works on is coons and possums.  You do need about 4' of straight trunk from the ground to the first branches (or fairly straight multiple trunks) to exclude squirrels, somewhat less for coons. 

 

A NAFEX  member once sent me a photo of a five gallon plastic pail split and attached to the trunk upside down which he swore by but it looked like it would take too much time to construct on the hundreds of trees I'm called on to protect. 

 

I know an electric fence can work and that chili, no matter how hot does not. 

 

I welcome the input of the members on this topic..

 

Thank you, Alan Haigh