These are Korean Giant Asian pears. Due to our summer drought, they stay small. They were fine as of a couple days ago.
Yesterday, it started to rain and has rained for over 24 hours now.
I just saw this damage this afternoin. At first, I thought the fruit exploded due to excessive water from the rain. But after taking a closer look, it looked like the damage was caused by animals. What animals? Birds? I have never seen bird pecks this badly.
Looks like birds. They’ve been doing the same thing to my tomatoes. They rarely ever touched my tomatoes up until this year. When they’re thirsty, they’ll go to anything that contains water.
Birds would be most logical, but I’ve never seen bird damage look like that, and birds don’t like my asian pears much anyway…I don’t think I’ve had a single bird peck on my Asian Pears.
It would be purely guess work, but I wonder if it could be a mouse or tree rat? I would think you’d see little teeth marks if it was. What about slugs? I’ve seen them do damage similar to that to tomatoes, but never heard of slugs getting into trees like that.
You always have this mystery damages! You figured out the last one (ground hog that damaged watermelon) and I hope you figure this one!
@Marco and @thecityman I am inclined to think the damage was done by birds.
Those three fruit are hanging from the same branch 4 ft from the ground. With such height, I should eliminate slugs from my list of suspects, shouldn’t I? Squirrels are possible but they tend to yank fruit off the tree.
Were it be in a warmer area, I would put bats on my list, too.
