First I noticed the leaves of my ‘Panachée’ fig leaf buds being eaten. Then every leaf off the ‘Sungold’ tomato. Then leaves off my peaches. I thought it was a caterpillar but I couldn’t see other signs that pointed to that. Finally when I saw a fat ground squirrel and some matching broken branches on my apricot and peach trees, I realized it was a varmint.
I’ve never lived anywhere I’ve had to deal with these as a garden pest and it’s complicated by the fact that I have a small plot in a greatly overgrown LARGE community garden. The leadership of the garden is nearly non-existent so even after nearly a year there, I have no directory or contact info, which makes cooperation from other plotholders in any garden-wide scheme impossible.
So, with that in mind, does anyone have suggestions from their own experience with ground squirrels as to what the approach should be? Fumigation is most efficacious but I’ll never be able to do that so my next choice if I can afford it is trapping. How can trapping not be utterly pointless in a very large garden where only one person is trapping?
Trapping can work in a large orchard with a few traps. It may be illegal to move the animals, however. When I lived with groundsquirrels several decades ago, they didn’t do much damage to my vegetable garden but they didn’t allow much harvest of apricots and tended to leave figs alone, as well as persimmons, plums, figs and pomegranates.
It was pot plants hidden in the chaparral that suffered the most, the squirrels seemed to devour the leaves for their water. Plants had to be protected with chicken wire cages- so there’s a possibility.
You seem to be suffering a very high level of pressure and other gardeners there must be also. You can probably organize a trap and removal campaign if it’s legal where you are. Here we have to kill them and even then, if a neighbor sees it and complains it becomes a cruelty to animals violation. It’s only illegal if someone complains, apparently. The law can be crazy.
Try different baits. An appropriately sized Hav-a-heart type works fine so does the squirrellinator. Baits are variable- they love the kind of black-oil sunflower seeds sold for bird feeders, but so do birds and they can be a nuisance springing traps that have a spring door and also just going into the squirrelinator. Nuts in the shell can discourage most birds if you can find them for sale. Jays love peanuts, and so do squirrels. Sweet corn works
Squirrels seem to sometimes need to be led into traps with a light trail of bait. The best placement of traps seems to be where they are a bit hidden to give them some sense of security.
Thank you. I’ve never handled anything larger than a mousetrap. Those were cheap enough I could sweep dead mouse & trap into a dustpan and put it in the outside trash. How do you usually handle traps? Does one need to worry about a dead or maimed ground squirrel attracting scavengers that somehow get in trouble with the trap?
I have to eliminate ground squirrels every year. A new population comes from neighboring properties and goes after my fruits, but they can be eliminated quite efficiently with traps. Both Black Box Gopher Trap and squirrellinator work well for me. The first one usually kills them on the spot, but with squirrellinator you will have to drown them. Ground squirrels are rather stupid and you can trap them one after another in the same trap. Note that ground squirrels are active during the day, so you should set your traps in the morning and check them in the evening.
You will likely get in trouble if you don’t check traps every evening when they are set. People are likely to get upset if they see a trapped animal that suffered a relatively slow and likely painful death. They can even die in a matter of a couple hours in the hot sun, so put traps in the shade.
I was also thinking that this might be an issue, particularly given your location (your profile lists Davis, CA). Many people in the greater Bay Area would be easily upset by trapping and/or poison. Don’t know that much about Davis but ppl on campus at UC Berkeley enjoy trying to hand-feed these disease vectors.
I’d go with killing traps, like the one Stan is suggesting or a tube trap, or a few of them. That way you just have to dispose of the dead animal, and don’t have to worry about killing or relocating it. The tube trap kills in a second or two, so to me that is as merciful as you can be.
Plague occurs in rural and semi-rural areas of the western United States, primarily in semi-arid upland forests and grasslands where many types of rodent species can be involved. Many types of animals, such as rock squirrels, wood rats, ground squirrels, prairie dogs, chipmunks, mice, voles, and rabbits can be affected by plague.
Doesn’t seem to be spreading via feeding squirrels, even if rodents can carry it, although it’s probably a good idea not to feed squirrels in Yosemite or other places where the plague is known to be carried by the local population. Squirrel quickly die from it, so it would probably be detected quickly in a Berkeley park. Seems like mice, rats and chipmunks pose a much greater danger as the disease doesn’t kill them. I’m thinking it shows potential as a biological squirrel control:wink:.
I also am opposed to feeding ground squirrels simply because I consider them vermin that multiply with easy access to food. My father kept a bird feeder constantly stocked with a mix equally appealing to rodents as birds, and no matter how secure the feeder, the birds seemed determined to knock more seed on the ground than they ate. There were always rat holes near his bird feeder and I’m sure it led to a steady and high squirrel population on his property. When I lived in his house, trapping out rats was a constant. At least they were kangaroo rats and not Norway rats.
I hate bird feeders- grow nutritious seeding plants if you want to feed wildlife.
There’s definitely precedent of ground squirrels carrying bubonic plague although the stories I’ve read are usually from less urban places. "ground squirrel" plague at DuckDuckGo
Thanks everyone for sharing your experiences and advice. School is keeping me awfully busy, but I do need to get busy and get something to address this as I can’t imagine getting much of a harvest on my small trees if my plot is located near a ground squirrel den.
The disease is exceedingly rare and there’s enough to worry about without fear of ground squirrels getting us sick. That’s all I’m saying. It’s not the first thing I’d think about when seeing some lonely person in a suburban park feeding a squirrel
What is extremely common is for the vermin to strip peaches and other fruit off trees even way before they are ripe. So my focus is on neighbors that find it immensely enjoyable to serve the feathered wildlife on their property a steady supply of human produced food in a manner that does the same favor for all the mammals that can find their way to where the “wasted” food falls, even if they are unable to reach the original buffet.
It would be considered a sanitation violation if you fed rats and mice your own garbage- animals, incidentally,. much more likely to spread plague to humans. Somehow, many of the same people interested in sustaining wilderness and ecological balance in the world don’t see the problem of artificially feeding birds on their own properties, even when they see a spike in the population of rats, mice and squirrels as a result. My father was one of them, but I never thought about it until I started growing fruit next door to neighbors that moved where I am because they love nature that engage in the same thing my nature loving father did.
At my father’s property, the first fruit tree I cared for was an apricot tree that came with the property- likely a chance seedling but with good sweet cots. The ground squirrels were only interested in the ripe fruit and removed all of it every other year or so. I never made the connection to the bird feeder until years later. Here it’s mostly grey squirrels and bird feeders are very helpful in keeping squirrel populations high because it removes the food scarcity of winter when snow can make it hard to find the acorns buried or on years when acorns are scarce.
A year without squirrel pressure is like an unexpected vacation for keepers of small orchards. They are as unwelcome as late hard frost.
Not referring to lonely people who enjoy feeding birds and squirrels at local parks.
On campus at UCB there are crowds of mostly tourists who think the squirrels are cute and try to take selfies, etc while feeding them, thereby acclimating wild animals to close interaction with humans. For a number of reasons this is not ideal.
But I’m certainly not heartless, and in my capacity as a mental health therapist (primarily working with foster youth) I understand that people find interacting with animals to be a joyful and therapeutic practice.