Squirrels

by Barry Carter

On a garden forum someone asked about how to keep squirrels from getting fruit. Another member of that forum wrote that squirrels don't like to be on the ground and try to stay in the trees, whenever possible. I responded to the second poster:

You have made some very good points about squirrels. It has taken me a while to figure this out with my apricot and plum trees.

I would like to preface the rest of this by noting that the squirrels we have in Baker City are not native. They were brought to our city park decades ago and they have since populated the whole town.

Since 2005 I have been documenting the difference between the size of my neighbor's apricots and plums and my apricots and plums. You can see my first pictures documenting this difference with plums on the bottom of the page at:
http://www.OrmusMinerals.com/documenting.htm

In 2005 and 2006 I recall that my neighbor's plum trees had about as many plums on each branch as mine. This may have been due to a relative scarcity of squirrels then, but I am not sure because squirrels don't seem to be as attracted to unripe plums as they are to unripe apricots.

I do know that some of the squirrels around here are quite bold. You can see one taunting my cats in January of 2006 at:

http://www.OrmusMinerals.com/2006-01-12-cats&squirrel.jpg

(I built my cats a ladder and platform outside my office window so I can tell when they are interested in coming inside as you can see at:

http://www.OrmusMinerals.com/2005-10-18-cats.jpg )

I suspect that the squirrel feels confident enough about his ability to out-climb my cats in the tree that he is willing to take the risk.

All of this is to point out another couple of methods to keep squirrels from nabbing fruit. At:

http://www.OrmusMinerals.com/apricots.htm

I pointed out that the reason my neighbor's "tree did not have as many apricots may be that my guard cats did a better job of keeping squirrels from stealing the apricots than their guard dogs did". Your post caused me to reexamine this conclusion. I began to think that a larger factor may be the continuity of branches that leads to my neighbor's trees and the lack of such continuity on my trees. You can see a couple of pictures which show the aboveground isolation of my apricot and plum trees at:

http://www.OrmusMinerals.com/2009-07-26-FruitTrees01.jpg
http://www.OrmusMinerals.com/2009-07-26-FruitTrees02.jpg

Notice in the picture below that even the overhead squirrel freeway (power line) is too far away from my plum tree to provide easy access:

http://www.OrmusMinerals.com/2009-07-26-FruitTrees03.jpg

My neighbor's trees, on the other hand, have easy squirrel access via my roof:

http://www.OrmusMinerals.com/2009-07-26-FruitTrees04.jpg

And my roof is easily accessible via the tree near my back door, that the squirrel in the picture above came from.

This tree is intertwined with another tree which is accessible from my wood pile, back fence and the alley behind my house.

You can see the upper part of this tree (above my roof) at:

http://www.OrmusMinerals.com/2009-07-26-FruitTrees05.jpg

and you can see how my roof provides a nice pathway for squirrels to my neighbor's plum trees on the lower right and their apricot tree in the center of the picture at:

http://www.OrmusMinerals.com/2009-07-26-FruitTrees06.jpg

My apricot and plum trees do not have such access:

http://www.OrmusMinerals.com/2009-07-26-FruitTrees07.jpg

While I was writing this, I took a break to mow my front lawn. When I went out to do this, I noticed a couple of squirrels in the yard of my neighbors across the street. I took a picture of one of these squirrels when he put his head up after digging around in their yard:

http://www.OrmusMinerals.com/2009-07-26-Squirrel.jpg

As you can see, this is a fairly open area, but these neighbors don't have any cats or dogs and the squirrel must feel pretty safe across the street from my cats.

When I mowed under my plum tree and my apricot tree, I noticed that there were a lot of plums and apricots on the ground:

http://www.OrmusMinerals.com/2009-07-26-FruitTrees11.jpg
http://www.OrmusMinerals.com/2009-07-26-FruitTrees10.jpg

Then I thought to look for plums and apricots on the ground under my neighbor's trees. I did not see any apricots on the ground under the part of my apricot tree that hangs over my neighbor's yard but this is only part of one branch so I decided to check under the plum trees on my neighbor's property to the south of my house.

These plum trees probably came from seeds from my tree that were planted by squirrels thirty years ago or more. You can see the oldest of these plum trees on the right in a winter 1988 picture out through my living room window (before I added the greenhouse):

http://www.OrmusMinerals.com/1988-Winter-SouthView-Before-Greenhouse.jpg

You can also see these trees (and my apricot tree) in a picture I took while I was building the greenhouse addition in August of 1993:

http://www.OrmusMinerals.com/1993-08-Greenhouse-Framing06.jpg

At:

http://www.OrmusMinerals.com/1993-Fall-Greenhouse-Done01.jpg

you can see a picture someone else took of the finished greenhouse addition in the late fall of 1993. Notice that the greenhouse windows are getting a lot of sun because the leaves have fallen.

In order to maintain the summer shade and winter sun from my neighbor's plum trees, I won't encourage my neighbors to cut them down. But this also means that they will remain right up next to my roof and accessible to the squirrels. You can see how much shade I still don't get in the winter at:

http://www.OrmusMinerals.com/2007-01-28-Greenhouse.jpg

Below is a link to a picture of the shady "tunnel" I must walk through to get from my back yard to my front yard along the south side of my house:

http://www.OrmusMinerals.com/2009-07-26-FruitTrees12.jpg

Notice how well shaded my greenhouse windows are. Also notice that some of the plums from my neighbor's trees will fall on my side of the fence and some will fall on their side of the fence.

My cats rarely go into this neighbor's yard because of their dogs. This means that the squirrels might be more comfortable on the ground on my neighbor's side of the fence. So I checked for fallen plums on both sides of this fence. At:

http://www.OrmusMinerals.com/2009-07-26-FruitTrees08.jpg

you can see several plums and plum seeds on my side of the fence. Directly across the fence, on my neighbor's side there are almost no plums and most of the seeds look like they have been cracked open:

http://www.OrmusMinerals.com/2009-07-26-FruitTrees09.jpg

This leads me to conclude that the presence of my cats and the lack of overhead access are both major factors in keeping the squirrels from my fruit trees.

I picked up as many of the largest fallen plums as I could find under my neighbor's trees and did the same under my plum tree. I took the ten largest of each then weighed and photographed them as you can see at:

http://www.OrmusMinerals.com/2009-07-26-Plums01.jpg

I was quite happy with these results but I was a bit disappointed that I could not get any apricots from my neighbor's tree to compare with mine. Then I remembered that I have an apricot tree on my rental property two blocks away. Unfortunately this apricot tree did not seem to have any apricots at all:

http://www.OrmusMinerals.com/2009-07-26-Rental-Apricot03.jpg

Either the squirrels got it, or it was nipped by frost in the spring or it is still recovering from the serious pruning my renter gave it before he left.

Fortunately, there is another apricot tree on my rental property. Actually it is half on my property and half on a neighbor's property:

http://www.OrmusMinerals.com/2009-07-26-Rental-Apricot01.jpg

This tree has plenty of apricots:

http://www.OrmusMinerals.com/2009-07-26-Rental-Apricot02.jpg

They are not as big as my apricots:

http://www.OrmusMinerals.com/2009-07-26-Apricots.jpg

I know that there are several stray cats in this area. So, this tree may have been protected by the cats. It also does not have easy access from above.

Next to the large apricot tree on my rental property is a large plum tree but this plum is a different variety than mine:

http://www.OrmusMinerals.com/2009-07-26-Rental-Plum03.jpg

These plums are larger and rounder than mine:

http://www.OrmusMinerals.com/2009-07-26-Rental-Plum04.jpg

Another plum tree on my rental property seems to have plums similar to mine:

http://www.OrmusMinerals.com/2009-07-26-Rental-Plum01.jpg
http://www.OrmusMinerals.com/2009-07-26-Rental-Plum02.jpg

I did a comparison of all the plums from all the trees as you can see at:

http://www.OrmusMinerals.com/2009-07-26-Plums02.jpg

This picture illustrates the circumstances which can skew comparisons like this. The first and last group of plums came off the ground near trees which are most likely from the same variety of plums. The differences between these two groups of plums are that one group got ORMUS minerals and the other did not. One group also came from a tree that was likely to have been protected from squirrels.

The plums in the second and third group definitely came from different varieties of plums and they probably also had less exposure to squirrels.

What I have learned from all of this is that you can protect fruit trees from squirrels by having limited overhead access and by having guard cats. Guard dogs don't seem to work as well and may keep the guard cats away.