Some ne’er-do-well with an orchard ladder is pretty specific. I have trees and still lack the task specific ladder. Narrows down the suspect pool a bit.
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My raccoons don’t leave much evidence other than bags piled at the bottom of the tree and broken limbs. Also, the ones they can’t get out of the bags have deep scratch marks.
Try the cheap bird netting on the trunk work for me this year
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Last year tanglefoot around the trunk seemed to be a good enough deterrent. Can’t say i blame them, getting the stuff on you sucks and I don’t even have fur, heck hardly any hair these days. So I’ll be doing that again in addition to removing the rodents between now and then.
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Wild turkeys. We have tons of them. This year 2 hens are escorting a lot of young turkeys through my orchards and front and back yards. They literally go from one area to the next, sampling all the wares. They do fly up into more horizontal branches to peck at fruit.
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That is amazing around here people would be begging you on their hands and knees to let them hunt. Turkey hunting is almost as popular as deer hunting and in some areas more popular.
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Found a squirrel tail next to the mature Tompkins King that has a whopping two apples left. 
. So one of the critters eating my apples got itself eaten.
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My two cents.
If you have the only honey pot in your yard, then of course all animals finding it attractive will want to feast from it.
If you however have a hundred pots, I doubt they will target your one prized pot.
If you have animals around then there is space for more trees, even if it is not on your land.
I suggest you go extreme and plant many more fruit trees. It is not only beneficial for you, but for others and the environment as well.
Now some critters are pests and they will keep on multiplying. As suggested, an air rifle (PCP) with night vision can keep most of these in check. It can be fun too, better than watching TV.
A while back we had a rat invasion. I shot 47 rats in two nights. Night three the last young arrogant male rat showed up and after his untimely death, the rats disappeared completely. Only “new” untrained rats make it to here, but not for long.
What is frustrating now is that there are not enough around to shoot.
If you don’t have wildlife that will benefit from the carcasses, then burry them, it will feed the soil.
But do plant more. We are supposed to live on a green planet.
A foot long rat.
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ha, nature doing the pest control for you. Shame it only got the one.
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If you plant a lot of fruiting plants nearby and don’t protect them from pests, those plants will just be a breeding ground for pests of all kinds.
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For every solution there is a problem.
Why do fruit trees in any case then at all. All you do is creating a breeding ground for pests of all kinds.
I disagree with your argument, when we were kids everybody had fruit trees. Lots of them. There was very few yards that did not have some fruit trees. And it was hard to find a tree with fruit that is destroyed by pests as is common off late.
And nobody used pesticides. Pesticides have effects far beyond what is initially visible, like the life that prey on pests are poisoned too, and then there is nothing to counter these pests. One example is bats, owls, frogs, earthworms etc.
If you destroy the nature around you, then there is always a new or another problem ready to show you that nature is broken.
And pests don’t target healthy trees or fruit. Something is amiss when that happens. Some of my peach trees are targeted by fruit flies, Others of the same peaches are mostly ignored/avoided.
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I actually got a few that night. My Afrikaner friend asked me to help out because the rats ate his chicks. Pieces are found everywhere every morning.
We sat at the gate of his chicken coop with mealies as bait for the rats. He was sitting besides me.
After I shot around six rats, he said - But you are shooting ALL MY rats now !
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Yesterday i filled 6 5-gallon buckets with these White Jersey apples. Why? Because I wage war on pests. Success is possible growing fruit, but you have to be relentless and ruthless. Here that means (1) fencing the trees and bushes to keep out deer and (2) eliminating roughly 60-80 gray squirrels, 8-12 racoons, 8-12 groundhogs, and 20-30 rabbits each year.
My solutions: Fencing, multiple layers. Traps, large and small, A pellet gun.
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I experimented this year with using screening material to “bag” fruit, especially peaches. Seems to have helped: after several years of having trees basically stripped, we got a nice load of clean fruit. Some of this may be due to year-to-year variability in the amount of pest pressure, though.
I use several of the Orbit Motion Activated Sprinklers for squirrels for my sweet corn and fruit trees with success. I’m in the Philly suburbs and deal mostly with only a couple of squirrels at a time and a rabbit or two. They learned to avoid my yard where the sprinklers are.
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Very good idea. Most critters don’t like to get wet, the water is good for the plants and it does not make an annoying noise like if you use an alarm to scare them off. I didn’t know you get these.
@Fanie, there are a few posts here about this product.
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Probably the largest Stayman my trees have grown. Too bad a deer decided that tearing down a fence and eating at least half of it was the thing to do. probably 4" in diameter.
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Not fruit per se, but I’ve been forced to start regulating the native wood rats (Neotoma fuscipes) in my backyard because they’ve been clipping tips off my boysenberry canes. I didn’t want to kill them but they’ve broken the unspoken agreement. I also suspect they’re responsible for some raspberry “pruning” a couple months back that I could never figure out how it was happening.
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