Last year I had a coon and also no pawpaws… I didn’t make the connection until I saw your post though, I had assumed it was deer last year. Finally trapped the coon late in the season. This year I recently got a heavier creature based on limb breakage and I am pretty sure it is a groundhog as nothing is eating the pawpaws on the ground.
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Strongly disagree. To me, a few of the Peterson ones have an aftertaste. It’s not as pronounced. Some more subtle than others, but it lingers on the back of your palate. I’m often considered a supertaster, so I have no idea how this will translate to your experience. Shenandoah and Allegheny are probably the only two Peterson pawpaws that I can eat more than one of in a single sitting.
Try a Wilson’s pawpaw. It’s an old named cultivar. KSU’s Dr. Kirk Pomper once joked that after you try Wilsons, “you may wish for death.”
I should also point out that phenolic wild taste is different from a pawpaw which may have a “strong” flavor. You can have one without the other.
I posted about my experience first time tasting a lot of pawpaws last year.
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Given their morphology and behavior, I would suspect raccoons as the tree climbers before groundhogs. Raccoons are very well known as climbers and can grow to over 25 kilos (55 lbs). Groundhogs rarely get above 6 kg (13 lbs) and are designed for digging, not climbing. All that said, individual animals can develop their own set of behaviors. Squirrels also like pawpaws and depending on the openness of habitat and proximity to other trees, some squirrels don’t like to be on the ground (unless they are planting black walnuts next to your vegetable garden).
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My groundhogs love tree climbing. I had a GH 8 ft up a wild apple tree the other day. Also my squirrels like pawpaws as much as they like everything else - a single bite in each fruit. They don’t bother beyond the first bite. >_<
Honestly, I don’t think it has anything to do with preference. It’s just that that like to sample and or have crappy memories of their own taste preferences. Of course, it’s perfectly possible they do this out of pure spite.
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I go by what I catch in the traps. Last year it was raccoons and I expect that was the problem. This year I caught some raccoons before any fruit ripened but none since then, and saw a groundhog several times in the area where I lost all the fruit and had the limb breakages. These are really just educated guesses, I am planning on getting some wildlife cameras for next season so I can be more certain what kind of trapping I need to do.
What do you do with them?
You can ditch them at most state parks. My ground hogs don’t really climb the tree. They just kind of shake the tree to get fruit to drop.
I have both gray and fox squirrels here. The grays get into the bird feeders, stuff their cheeks full, flinging seed as they do, run off to stash the seed, come back for more, repeat until the feeder is empty.
The fox squirrels climb up, take one sunflower seed or peanut, settle down, eat it carefully, select another, and soon move on to another food source.
Gray squirrels wind up in the stew pot. Fox squirrels don’t.
Yes, but I was hoping @scottfsmith might tell us he has a collection of squirrel, raccoon, and groundhog skulls adorning his property each set on atop a pike as a warning to the local wildlife population.
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Haha! I drive the bigger animals to the woods north of me. Squirrels get swimming lessons, they flunk every time.
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My raccoons get swimming lessons which they flunk.
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mine dont taste resinous