I guess common sense isn’t so common. just need to be careful of your background. i have houses all around me. all within 100yrs.i either make sure the shot goes over their property or into the ground where it won’t go anywhere if it passes through the animal.
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“into the ground” is totally safe. That’s one reason why I am OK with suburban deer hunting from tree stands. But “over their property” seems risky. The pellet that misses one neighbor may hit the next, no?
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If at a high enough angle it will come down with very little velocity. for a small caliber like a .22 that has little mass, it wont do any damage and definitely wont hurt someone. im surrounded by woods and fields so there’s little chance it would hit property or people anyway. in a suburb, i would try shooting toward the ground or use a small gauge shotgun that has much more limited range.
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Coons - by far. Possums, next. I kill about 40 coons a year and they still get almost all my fruit. Deer cant climb trees.
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I’ll be different, spider mites. They never fail to appear in the greenhouse. I’ve got a new tactic this year. Hit them hard and often with a high pressure spray of plain olde water.
I’ve got fencing that controls deer, wild hogs, and javelina. All ever present threats even in this desert. Coons, fox, birds, and skunks it’s still a battle.
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Deer and rabbits for me. The former will go down the line of my young trees and eat the terminal buds. They will also rub on my bigger trees. I can never seem to catch them in the act. They’ll come right through town and into my yard. I can shoot the rabbits in the day time with .22 SSS. Not so much with deer. Big, ugly fencing is my only protection. Considering getting an orchard dog…
Also, cicadas. They kill as many young trees as deer. I get overwhelmed with the annual variety. Survival of the fittest in my young orchard.
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Voles, they decimated my experimental orchard of sub hardy apples. They took out 25 of the 30 trees and effectively killed 5 years of work and my will.
. In my greenhouse I had to wrap the trunks of my fruit trees every year until my friend the weasel moved in. After the weasel died, drown in my water bucket, I was afraid again but garter snakes took his place and I have not had a vole problem since.
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got to hire mink man on youtube to come out and kill voles for us. 
if his mink can kill rats and muskrats, it should be able to kill voles.
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Ferrets are weasels, and they would love killing voles. And rabbits, etc. And there’s just about nowhere they can’t/won’t go.
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Minks are even better as they are semi aquatic and are in the weasel family. water doesn’t stop them. they even catch fish.
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squirrels -grey city ones.
aphids, they gross me out
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Mockingbirds, cats, and scale.
Mockingbirds/catbirds get every single blueberry (production has been limited but I’ve yet to eat one). Had to bag all my loquats because the mockingbirds would just peck a hole in every single one of them. My loquat tree is by the road so even if I could get away with it, don’t think I’d shoot in that direction with a pellet gun. Maybe a BB gun but it wouldn’t be discreet.
Cats I’m trying to see the good side (although they haven’t protected anything from birds) there are anywhere between 7 and a million outdoor cats in this neighborhood. They love to defacate in my yard and dig in my mulch. Maybe they keep some mice or rats down around my chickens (never seen one or sign of one so I’m being generous)
Scale routinely partially defoliates my citrus when I move it to the greenhouse. It’s such a weird bug I just don’t like it, I can always get rid of it quickly manually, but it is hard to spot sometimes. Very alien tick like bug, would like them to not exist.
Raccoon are looking to get added to the list but if I have a problem this year on my peaches, measures will be taken.
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Coddling moth for sure. I put out the traps and spray organic sprays on a schedule, but still have 1/3 - 1/2 of my apples with a worm…
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Squirrel is my arch nemesis. Destroyed container plants last year digging them up over and over and over again and killing a few of my favorite perennials with the constant digging/exposing of half a root system. I have tacked down a wide weave burlap over the soil of my containers this year and we’ll see. But, I wanted to add fox…not as bad as squirrel because she’s not relentlessly stupid. But, we have a fox that digs epically big holes in my gardens, buries eggs everywhere and sometimes seems to just kill mice for sport and leave them around the gardens/driveway. It’s crazy. And this is an urban/suburban area! But, unlike squirrel, she is easily deterred by the hottest dried peppers I can find.
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caught 2 crows pecking around in my mulched raised beds with my garlic. didn’t think they ate garlic. they’re still dormant so i doubt they did any damage. maybe looking for worms. when they saw me in the window they took off.
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Fox, bear, deer, robin.
The fox has gotten into the habit of stealing things even right next to the front door. Also my stonefruit and strawberries. No electric fence has hindered him yet.
The local black bear is alright, but sometimes we’ll get one from some campground or something so he’s not afraid of anything. All of them wreak my exposed pipes, and will kill any unprotected apple tree (they sit the middle and break branches to bring the apples to them). Luckily, electric fences stop them, but it didn’t stop our last tourist from doing this the night after we picked the garden and packed the truck.
He didn’t care about the dog and would charge you. If he’d come back, I had a bear tag and the 6.5 creedmoore on hand.
Deer are painful, but at least you can fence or prune trees up to avoid them. The biggest problem is when they work in tandem with the bears. One breaks, and the other cleans up what’s left.
The robins are simply an annoyance. They seem to run a relay race from my berry patches, especially the strawberries.
Fortunately I don’t have them, but everyone a few miles upstream from us suffer from mountian beavers, aka “Boomers”.
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once a bear gets fearless like that they have to go. my father, about 10 yrs ago, had one going in his garbage. then he saw him during the day playing with the dog. it was cute until he broke in his greenhouse and destroyed all his plants. got the ol’ man’s 30-06 the next day. a 120lb. yearling.
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Yeah, the fires we get often seem to push these fearless bears into us. Our resident bear was named “Toby” by the fire crews a few years back. He grew up being chased by the dogs, so he minds his own business. We haven’t had to pop any bears yet, but they’ve definitely gotten to the last straw. I guess they can smell gunpowder and think twice. A few year ago, someone driving down the highway across the river from us sent us a photo of a bear wandering around on our roof.
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My German Shepard digs out and gnaws on random plants in my landscape. I’ve started planting sacrificial woody plants near my good stuff.
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