Dogs are a lot of work to care for, but if you are going to do that anyway, any fruitgrowers dog needs to be a squirrel and coon killer.
1 Like
The only animal I’ve seen take down squirrels besides dogs and cats (cats don’t usually kill enough) are foxes, although I’m sure coyotes do as well. A momma fox can clean out quite a few quickly and sometimes bring control.
That said, I protect hundreds of trees from squirrels affectively with my squirrel baffles and have often mentioned it here and yet somehow it hasn’t been widely adopted by members of this forum and I wonder why. Hell, I have a next door neighbor whose never seen baffles on my property (I don’t use them for my orchard for a couple of reasons) that is using them on his property- I don’t even know how he learned about them.
30 years ago when I started trying to protect fruit against grey squirrels here all I saw used in my area that was similar was duct pipe, which works well but is a pain to install and pretty expensive. I’m sure I’m not the first one to think of using roofing coil stapled into the trunks of trees that are trained to have no branches below 5’ of straight trunk, but I bet I’ve protected more trees for more seasons with the method than anyone you are likely to meet.
At some point I started painting them with a mixture of axel grease and motor oil so they can’t muscle there way up them. DIY Squirrel Baffle ideas? - #24 by alan
the only reason for me is that I keep my trees very short, mostly, and I’m very short too. they can jump to low branches, a baffle wouldn’t stop that.
I think it’s brilliant for people with full sized trees it seems like it would work very well
I use the pipe on trunks, but when the branches bend down under the weight of fruit, the varmints can jump to them.
Then you find a way to pull the branches up with string to the higher center of the tree or crutch them with baffled crutches. Or you just cut off the branches and save what’s above. That’s just part of the continuing battle. I usually get crop for my customers without having to kill squirrels for them.