Smert' belkam (death to squirrels)

[quote=WebSlave;1997660I don't know what got into the squirrels this year. I have had minor problems with them in the past, but generally it was just one squirrel. If I could shoot that one, then the problem was over with for the season. This year, they have just gone berserk and have done extensive damage to the new shoots coming up.[/QUOTE]

What was the mast crop in your area like last year? Its possible that you had a higher survival rate over the winter due to lots of food int he fall but now that supply has decreased the squirrels are looking for other food sources.

I'm surprised that they are going after the bamboo as the cyanogenic glycosides are generally a pretty good deterrent.

Ed

Lol this has been a very entertaining post! I think what you need are some cats to solve your problem! My dad has a farm and we have 6 cats there! 2 are indoors the rest are outside! They're awesome squirrel catchers! I saw one jump six feet in the air and grab one off a tree limb one time! They're incredible! They also hunt gofers! But since they've killed all the gofers and squirrels they've mainly switched to a dove diet! Anyways a cat could probably work or a dog! But it seems like your killing squirrels just fine on your own lol


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Thanks for the suggestions, but no, after having LOTS of animals for LOTS of years, I am over that. You have no idea what a relief it is to not have a lot of animals depending on you day in and day out.

Connie sometimes talks about wanting to get a dog, and I just tell her to go ahead. But she is the one going to be picking ticks off of it, giving it heartworm medication, and watching it getting eaten alive when mosquito and yellow fly seasons go into full swing. I really think this would be a brutal place to put a dog into. I know there are people around us with dogs, but quite honestly, they don't seem to live very long.

As for cats, well, they would be problematic. We have bird feeders out, and sometimes quite a crowd of birds roosting and nesting around here. My guess is that the cats would go after the low hanging fruit rather than the more difficult to catch squirrels. We once had three stray cats come around that someone had apparently dumped. After a day or two, Connie felt sorry for them and had just made up something for them to eat and was carrying it out to the porch for them when one of them snagged up one of "her" green anoles right in front of her and killed it. Big mistake on their part. I got commanded to break out the 12 gauge bird bombs and make it known that the cats were no longer welcome around here.

Heck, maybe I need to stop relocating the gray rat snakes we find around here. But there too, again, they seem to hang around the bird feeders, so Connie isn't going to have any of that.

But one good thing. Being retired, I DO have the time to just sit out in the hunting blind and practice on my patience. It's really not all that hard to sit absolutely still for an hour or more if you don't have a whole lot of stuff that you feel you need to be doing other than waiting for squirrels to show up. Now I know exactly what that phrase "the patience of a hunter" really means.

Originally Posted by WebSlave

Connie sometimes talks about wanting to get a dog, and I just tell her to go ahead. But she is the one going to be picking ticks off of it, giving it heartworm medication, and watching it getting eaten alive when mosquito and yellow fly seasons go into full swing. I really think this would be a brutal place to put a dog into. I know there are people around us with dogs, but quite honestly, they don't seem to live very long.

There have been some good advances in controlling fleas, ticks and mosquitoes for dogs as an example Advantix topical treats fleas, ticks and mosquitoes.
There are even flavored soft chews you can give the dog that will kill the ticks and fleas when they get on the dog, so you really don't have to pick the ticks off the dogs anymore (I live in a wooded area of Southern Jersey and the tick population is really high here, I get more ticks than the dog does).
Also our vet recommends the Seresto collars which are good for 8 months and aren't greasy as an option to the topical applications.

So if your wife wants to pick out a dog, the whole care thing has become a lot easier.

Here we have a lot of problems with the squirrels raiding our feeders so they have a learning curve of whether they can make it out of the yard before the dog gets them and I've been known to move the feeders a little further from the fences to make it more sporting for the dog. After a few close calls the squirrels usually stop messing with our feeders (and he usually gets one or two a summer).

Ed

The advances in medication have been good Ed, but now that he is talking about it I recall the mosquito stories from Rich. Naturally the dog would have to be outside to get at the squirrels, and I think that might be pretty miserable for a while during the mosquito season.

Oh yeah, absolutely it would have to be an outside dog. The absolute rule here is "NO ANIMALS INSIDE THE HOUSE".

I think the yellow fly season (which seems to be gearing up right now) would be even worse than the occasional population blooms of mosquitoes. You can ignore a mosquito bite. But a yellow fly bite? Not a chance. Those suckers HURT. Of course, there is always a chance that a dog will walk onto a fire ant nest as well, so there is that other challenge we have around here. We try to eradicate ant nests as much as is practical, but a dog would wonder around much more than are usual pathways we take. I often wonder how the box turtle population has been impacted by fire ants. The box turtle's defense mechanism is to just stop and close up the shell when threatened. That shell isn't going to be fire ant proof. We normally see box turtles when we get our temporary pond filled with heavy rains, but didn't see any so far this year.

But anyway, I wouldn't try to stop Connie from getting a dog, but she needs to be fully aware of what she would be getting in to. We often joke about when she does something that later proves to have been not a real good decision. She always says to me "Why didn't you STOP me?"

We joke that on our tombstones, I will have "Here's another fine mess you have gotten us in to", and her's will have the above mentioned quote engraved. Of course, we are joking, as I have gotten us into enough messes myself one time or another. Case and point was when Connie took over the mouse breeding facility when we had the animals. I'm sure she thought MANY times, "How did he get me into this mess?" So I guess we could interchange the tombstones.

We have been getting rain all day today, so I haven't put in any time in the blind yet. Which was nice, because I got to sleep in this morning. I'm really not a morning person, so this was a nice break in the regimen. It is still raining now, but if it stops before late evening, I will have to go down there on patrol. I've noticed that the squirrels tend to come out pretty heavily right after a rain.

The thing about the mosquito part of the dog treatment is that it also repels them before they bite, I've been out with my dog and he isn't getting bothered by them but I was getting chewed up by Asian tiger mosquitoes.

The deer fly around here are pretty bad at times but there are some simple controls to reduce their populations (like attaching one of these traps to a mower or vehicle and driving around http://entnemdept.ufl.edu/pestalert/deerfly.htm) as for yellow flies you can locally reduce their populations by suspending a ball about the size of a soccer ball on some fishing like about 4-5 feet off the ground painting it black and applying tanglefoot spray to it. That can really reduce the population in a small yard, larger yards would require more traps.

Its been documented more than once that fire ants do predate on adult box turtles as well as hatchlings and while the eggs are actually hatching. They are known to be a problem not only for the box turtles but for gopher tortoises and sea turtle nests and that non-fatal attacks on turtles can significantly reduce the long-term survival of the individual.

Ed

Originally Posted by EdwardK

The thing about the mosquito part of the dog treatment is that it also repels them before they bite, I've been out with my dog and he isn't getting bothered by them but I was getting chewed up by Asian tiger mosquitoes.

The deer fly around here are pretty bad at times but there are some simple controls to reduce their populations (like attaching one of these traps to a mower or vehicle and driving around http://entnemdept.ufl.edu/pestalert/deerfly.htm) as for yellow flies you can locally reduce their populations by suspending a ball about the size of a soccer ball on some fishing like about 4-5 feet off the ground painting it black and applying tanglefoot spray to it. That can really reduce the population in a small yard, larger yards would require more traps.

Its been documented more than once that fire ants do predate on adult box turtles as well as hatchlings and while the eggs are actually hatching. They are known to be a problem not only for the box turtles but for gopher tortoises and sea turtle nests and that non-fatal attacks on turtles can significantly reduce the long-term survival of the individual.

Ed

So the mosquito repellent treatment doesn't work for humans too?

The drawback with the "sticky ball trap" idea is that we are afraid that it would also catch a bunch of the green anoles we have around here. Especially if they see wiggling flies on the ball. Otherwise we would have put sticky traps out for flies a long time ago. We used to use sticky traps like that in the mouse building to catch up the tons of gnats that used to plague that building. And even then, sometimes an anole would get inside that building and wind up on a trap.

Actually the mosquito magnets work pretty well at catching yellow flies, and I have one running right now. Got a bunch of them that have failed here and there, so maybe I need to ship them off to get them repaired. Anyway, I found that putting some sort of whirly-gig that moves in the wind next to a mosquito magnet really works well for drawing the yellow flies to it. They seem to be very tuned in to any sort of movement. I also read somewhere that the yellow flies are attracted to the color blue, so of course I am using blue whirly-gigs. I really need to get another mosquito magnet working. When I walked down to the blind early evening today after the rain stopped, I had several flies dive bombing me like crazy. I was able to kill four of them, but I expect things to get a LOT worse before they get better.

And I believe the squirrels might have been out in the rain today. I saw a new shoot with fresh chews on it.

Hit a dry patch where I couldn't have hit a barn even if I was standing inside of it. But I did pop one this morning, so maybe I'm back on the beam. Score stands at 9 confirmed kills, and 5 probables. But yellow fly season is gearing up right now, so just walking to and from the blind is getting to be quite a challenge. When you have a half dozen of those suckers buzzing around your head and you know they are going to HURT if they take a bite, well, sort of takes all the fun out of a walk in the woods.

Still got a few new shoots coming up, but with the rains being sparse this time of year, I'm seeing some shoots just dying back because of lack of water. And I think either I have thinned the squirrel herd back substantially, or there are just greener pastures available for the remaining population of tree rats. But they sure as heck did a LOT of damage this year. I hope I remember this for next year and set up the blind early enough to start weeding them out BEFORE the bamboo shoots start coming up.