North American Fruit Explorers mailing list at ibiblio

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

Alan, I was thinking of trying tangletrap this year and noticed your mention of it.  My peach trees are in a location where I can't reliably shoot the squirrels and they have gotten most of my peaches for the last several years (note that I am clearing out squirrels year-round with my pellet gun, and I have only seen one (now-dead) squirrel in the last two weeks in my yard, but surely a bunch will descend once the peaches start to ripen).  If the tangletrap even slowed them down a bit I would call that a victory.  My peach trees are all closely-planted and about 8' tall; my plan was to put the tangletrap on the main trunks of all of the trees.  Good plan?

I have a whole pile of squirrel traps (three different brands, Kania, tube, and Havahart) and I have not been able to reliably get the squirrels in the traps as opposed to munching on the peaches.  I even bought some "professional" squirrel bait to try but they still went after the peaches instead.

Scott

Alan Haigh writes:

Fox urine is one of many squirrel repellents I've wasted money on.  I found
it rather repulsive but my squirrels aren't so squeamish.  They like their
green peaches and pears spicy too, so you can forget pepper.  I've found
them quite repelled by buck-shot and moderately repelled by tangle trap and
netting, but not reliably so.