Squirrel Pressure Question

General Fruit Growing
21

I’ve never seen a snake in a tree, ever… I guess it’s a southern thing? You might be able to put a ring of pipe foam or similar below the netting, if it stuck out enough it might keep the snakes out.

After 20 years of trapping squirrels raccoons possums and groundhogs it’s been one of the biggest pains in maintaining my orchard. The traps need to be monitored regularly, they often fail and need re-tuning, if baited too frequently the birds learn to steal all the bait so you need to do it in waves, foxes try to drag away the traps so they always need to be well-secured, live traps for larger animals can catch foxes cats etc, disposing of larger animals in live traps is generally a pain, you can’t keep it up when out of town, etc. etc. What a massive pain!!! I usually trap three to five dozen squirrels a year and 3-5 larger animals. I’d sacrifice a couple snakes if I had to, I’d feel better about a killing a couple snakes than fifty squirrels.

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22

@Zone6 Has that rat poison worked on squirrels?

23

The snakes got stuck near the ground, I may have misunderstood how you use the netting. I had netting on 4 poles around the trees, to keep deer out. Killed 5 or so racers with this, so I switched to 2x4 galvanized fencing.

24

Ah. The netting starts several feet off the ground and is wrapped right around the trunk, I have some pictures on the other thread. I don’t think it would catch any snakes.

I use the bird netting for deer, but its also only higher up - my deer fencing has holes that are too big so I use this stuff to keep them from poking the fencing in to get at the leaves.

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25

For those who haven’t seen the pictures in the other thread:

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