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I am a bit ruthless when it comes to coons. They yank apples off of Honeycrisp. Pixie Crunch, etc., and ruin branches, plus they are a very big disease vector. So hand traps with bait and then shoot them the next morning. I figure between that and road kill I have them under control for now.
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Alan has one way to deal with Bears and it can work. Bears are no one’s friend. They get into corn and can wreckseveral hundred square feet of corn in no time flat. They can wreck bigger apple trees than can white tail and they can be dangerous. Electric fences can deter them, but the best thing is to get an any time any number permit from your game warden type and shoot them. There are so many of them here in the Shenandoah Valley and north that we get road kills of juveniles of US 81 and US 66. Bottom line is that we have many more bears than we used to - cattle guys hate them, dirt farmers hate them,and orchard types have no use for them either.
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they are destructive here also and there are too many so our game biologists brought up the limit to 2 per person to thin them out.
We’ve had bear on our back deck, looking in the window while we watch TV. Every time we’ve had bear here at the house it’s been our own fault, keeping the bird feeders out too late in the season and drawing them in. Eliminate the temptations and they have no interest in coming near the house. In our rural location we leave them alone and they leave use alone.
Freakin’ racoons stole my one and only first year fruiting Cherry Cox and a couple other apples.
The back-scratchin’ tree (date on the trail-cam was wrong):
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i had one 5 yrs ago get into my old chic coop. tore the door off the hinges and ate the 50lbs of feed and the eggs but left the chics alone. woke up to birds all over the yard. must have sacred them all into the run and couldnt fit thru the chicken door so he gave up. after 50lbs of feed and a doz. eggs was probably full anyway.
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After I posted that I was thinking "…but if a bear damaged my trees… ! " They do pull down the Juneberries here to eat the fruit, usually snapping off the tree.
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