Don’t tell anyone, but I had great success poisoning squirrels. I put a bait station on the fence where the squirrels run past, and filled it with “peanut butter” flavored bait. The baits I can find any more aren’t super lethal, they have to eat it for a good while to die. At a certain point I was reloading it every 24-48 hours. It took a couple of months, but there were zero squirrels in the neighborhood for over a year!
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i put out peanut butter flavored block bait for the voles in the fall. maybe thats why i don’t see many squirrels as they probably got into the bait also before the snow came.
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My back yard is overflowing with critters. Fortunately, there is lots of food all around so they mainly sample my trees here and there. An unfenced tree will get destroyed by a buck in the fall. A low electric fence around the sweet corn works very well on raccoons. An old neighbor trapped and killed 13 raccoons in a couple months. I think he gave up. Here is a trail camera in my back yard.
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To be clear: the presence of people (like me) who chose to live adjacent to a wilderness area is why we have so much wildlife to contend with here. It doesn’t seem reasonable to me to suggest that we should kill them all to protect our fruit trees. Your situation may well be different. I’m just relating what has worked for us, as a possible alternative for @Girly.
See above. This is how we deal with the wildlife issue here, and note that I began my description by saying that I’m describing my experience, and I’m talking about my neighbors. It’s not clear to me why you find it dismaying, or indeed have much of an opinion about it at all.
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When raptors- eagles, hawks, owls- eat those poisoned squirrels they can die. This secondary poisoning of raptors is a big problem. I hate squirrels but would never resort to poison as it doesn’t stop at the squirrel.
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It’s anticoagulant poison, it has to be eaten continually for a good while to be lethal. There’s a reason it’s the only poison still for sale (at least here in CA).
A lot of the new formulations have low secondary poisoning risk, mostly because the newest generation of rodenticides aren’t anti-coagulants (such as bromethalin). Just pointing that out for those that use them.
source - national pesticide information center
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There’s also the “natural poisoning” route.
CO2 shot up their nasal passage. Rats and squirrels die. Leave carcas out as warning or to feed predators. No chemical residue. Only down side is this stuff is expensive to maintain. But hey, it’s absolutely zero secondary or primary poisoning risk.
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The reason bait is a last resort control method is that wildlife continues to suffer from secondary poisoning. I just read of a mountain lion in S. CA found dead that was diagnosed from an autopsy to have been poisoned by eating poisoned rodents. Many predators are weakened if not outright killed by ingesting these poisons on a regular basis.
What is frustrating for suburban fruit growers is neighbors often have rodent feeding stations that they tell themselves are bird feeders. Even the best engineered versions can’t stop the birds from spreading a lot of seed below and most allow squirrels to find a way right to the feeder.
They also drive up rat populations, not just tree rats. I think they should be illegal. Let people plant species that feed birds and draw them to their property that way, they can also simply allow a part of their lawn to go to seed (neighbors permitting). Wildlife shouldn’t be given free lunch (breakfast and dinner) IMO- it ceases to be wildlife at that point.
Of course, trying to convince bird watchers who derive great joy from watching flocks of birds congregating at their “soup kitchens” to feel as I do is a virtual impossibility. But in neighborhoods where Norway rats are a problem AND there is a range of wildlife, bird feeders play into this vicious cycle of creating rodent epidemics that are handled with poison bait that kill non-feathered wildlife. Ironic, that.
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Forget about bird feeders, my neighbor has a squirrel feeding station! She attracts every squirrel within 50 mile area. I haven’t mentioned my tube trap business to her 
.
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But Jerry think about it, this ‘unreasonableness’ has been done since antiquity. Otherwise we’d all be stacked up in cities. Mankind has had to ‘fend’ for food forever.
I get it. All varminting is local. My reaction was to “neighbors who don’t (care about their gardens), don’t”, since this thread was started by someone who clearly cared about their garden. All varminting is local.
thats why i put poison bait out just before snowfall . any dead voles decompose under the snow. i would never poison in the summer for said reasons.
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Seems to me that an excessive number of species “X” is likely due to an imbalance of some kind. I have squirrels and coons, but they don’t wreak total havoc on any of our crops. We also have coyotes, loads of raptors, fishers, bobcats, black bears, and relatively infrequent wolf visitors. Add in the fact that local folks hunt/trap most any species for which there is a season…critters around here don’t get out of whack population wise most of the time.
edit…I guess I should also add that there’s lots of natural plant food around here for critters too. Wild apples, crabapples, oaks, hawthorns, hazelnuts, dogwoods, berries of many kinds, etc. etc. etc.
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i have over grown fields on 2 sides of me here. my cats keep the voles there from spring till’ fall but come winter the buggers come in under the snow! I’ve had 6 nanking cherries girdled so bad they never recovered!
I just burst out laughing when I scroll down to your second picture! Never seen that many raccoons in one place.
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That’s a great idea, although it doesn’t seem like the best implementation with what looks like a plastic anvil. You can look around, there are a number of modifications out there to be able to use bulk CO2 in that type of application. Sodastream users are the biggest group I know of. Since you only need a quick flow of compressed gas (don’t need CO2 because you’re not… drinking… rodents…), you could actually connect it to an air compressor.
Do the squirrels get really mangled and squished inside, or do they fall back out? The video is very careful not to let you see that part. We usually kill rats and mice with the zapper traps, and they’re great because there’s no mess; I’m curious how messy these are. I’ve never gotten a squirrel in an zapper, not sure if they don’t go in or if it’s just not strong enough.
EDIT: OK, so assuming it works like the smaller mouse/rat version, it looks like their necks snap but it doesn’t spray blood or guts around. Cool!
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No…there really are too many wildlife anymore. As a child, 89% of the 200+ acres I lived on were forested.
Saw one deer in 18 years. No bears. Several squirrels, but no “invasions”. Groundhogs, crows and beetles on beans and potatoes and tobacco.
/ And the birds never ate all our cherries!
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