@steveb4 … that is one of those unspoken rules for us southerners…
Any time you fry chicken squirrel turkey deer, etc… you have to make gravy with the frying pan leftovers and have some mashed potatoes and biscuits with that.
Since I have to KETO now to remain healthy… those are mostly just memories now.
I use rat traps in my peach trees, mostly I catch mice and chipmunks
Peanut butter with sunflower seeds pressed in.
Also a 5 ft pc of 4 inch drain pipe left out, capped at one end. They go in the hide. I let my Jack Russel out, when he barks I know he has one in the pipe. I tilt it right to his face, chomp.
terriers are great for rodent control. man are they fast lil’ buggers! ball of pure energy!
STRONGLY disagree with just letting cats out to hunt. They have had a massive destructive impact on native bird populations. Even though they will probably squirrels too just look at Australia and their massive problem with invasive species (including cats) destroying the ecosystem.
It’s illegal to kill squirrels here.
I think that’s only true of the native species, right? I never see the Western gray squirrels anywhere, just the invasive eastern gray & occasionally the invasive fox squirrel. I believe those are not protected, as their invasiveness is the reason the native squirrels are protected. Here’s a pamphlet on squirrel species in WA state, it looks like there are a few different ones that are native, but the invasive eastern gray is most common in urban and residential areas (and it is not protected):
I heard Just One Bite works pretty well when placed in winter or early spring when they’re particularly hungry.
Yes, I suppose I was thinking of indiscriminate ways of getting rid of them.
A blast from the past. 1979… Me on the right, my brother in the middle and my friend on the left… after a Saturday morning squirrel hunt.
My brother had taken off most of his clothes… because we all got covered in seed ticks… a real possibility when you squirrel hunt in TN.
I bought that 55 Chevy for 400.00 that I earned working at the local ball park… official score keeper, 5.00 per game… over a couple of summers. It had a 350 engine, 4 barrel carb, and a 8 track tape player.
The old pic is about faded away… sorry for the quality.
Three young men having some wholesome good fun! This reminds me of Boomer, NC. Don’t you wish that Chevy was still in the barn? This picture is quality!
I removed 24 red squirrels around the house last summer, .22 pistol with shot shells. Here at the house we have red squirrels, but at the orchard it’s gray squirrels.
Ones I tried an alligator in coating deep fried. What can I say. If it is coated and deep fried, most likely you will not recognize - chicken, squirrel or alligator. They all taste deep fried - that is. 
I used to use tangle foot, but it doesn’t deter squirrels when the choice is pillaging fruit or starving, however, if you want to randomly kill birds, it is extremely affective, which means if a neighbor complains, you might be in trouble with the law no matter how much you put your fruit above wildlife. It is also messy, disgusting stuff to work with.
I’ve had good success with the squirrelinator trap- much better than any of the other traps I have tried. Perseverance is required, and cleverness, because in bad squirrel years everything tends to be hungry, including birds which like to steal bait from traps. Skunks will fit into a small trap as well- and the traps don’t allow for easy release. .
For my customers, baffles are effective. Roofing coil forming cylinders by stapling to the trunk from the ground to 5’ up the straight trunk (trees most be trained for this) and kept slick with a coat of oil mixed with some grease will do the job on sites where the squirrels don’t jump that high. Some sites the baffle has to be as high as 6.5’ where the pests have an Olympic jumping team. Often the branches start too low and you have to make a cone to get protection.
What sucks is when you protect the fruit from squirrels and then the air force comes. It gets complicated netting trees with baffles on- but we do that as well.
My customers often spend a great deal of money in order to harvest their fruit. For the rest of us, it can become a very time consuming hobby.
I have a 20G shotgun, but shooting squirrels on a bad year takes way too much time. Not my protein source. We’ve had about the 3rd consecutive year of acorn crop failure so at sites that don’t have chickens or bird feeders, squirrel populations remain very low. Wet, cool springs seem to have rotted the crop.
They are true Olympians!.. I haven’t had one Grey squirrel break the 5 foot mark yet (I started out at 4 foot and moved the metal cylinder up on one of my mulberry trees until my Trailcam showed no more breaches). But I feel if it were a peach tree, that they would find a way to jump higher. I find that placing foam rubber or a mound of old bird netting around the base of the tree denies them the ability to launch themselves up the tree (When the lowest limb is less than 5 feet and you can’t place the metal higher). The only birds I feel the Tanglefoot would present a problem is with woodpeckers, and if the woodpecker happens to be a Yellow-bellied Sapsucker, I hate them more than squirrels. They have killed so many of my fruit trees.
Wow, sapsuckers have killed a lot of your fruit trees! Here they are only lethal to trees that lack adequate vigor, like ancient apple trees- and they only go after apple trees, period. When an old apple trees dies, I can’t even be certain it was the sapsuckers that are the reason, but the correlation is pretty convincing.
I’ve thought about how to reduce squirrel launching power, but decided it is less work to raise the baffles. I baffle up probably a thousand fruit trees every year- or maybe only 500 and it seems like a thousand. The process vastly complicates my spring season.
If a tree is being badly injured by sapsuckers, tanglefoot would seem a reasonable option.
That is very impressive. I have never doubted that you are a savant of protecting fruit trees.
The sapsuckers killed three of my apple trees, and yes, they weren’t the most healthy trees at their end, but I feel all of the years they were drilling holes in the trucks weakened them until the last couple of years their poor health became apparent. They also like to drill pear and jujube, but I now protect the trucks of those trees.
You’ve probably tried it in all possible ways, but wondering how come the flashing is required from the ground up?
In other words, what happens if you staple flashing from, say, 3 to 5’, or 4 to 6.5’? Are the squirrels able to climb up the tree to the bottom of the flashing, and then jump vertically two feet past the flashing, and still land on the trunk?
Because it is hard to keep the grease-oil from getting on the trunks of trees and it is occasionally lethal or appears to be. It can look like the right amount and then a hot day comes and it drips. I’ve only recently begun to waste that extra aluminum, but it also makes it somewhat harder for squirrels to launch. They actually do a good job of launching from lower in the trunk- apparently go higher from that position than from the ground.
It has long been my method for particularly high pressure areas just for that reason, but it usually isn’t necessary.
How high can a squirrel jump ?
Per his testing 46 47 inches… (gray squirrel).
TNH, I owe you a few beers!
